tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29205185868296858632024-03-13T09:18:55.012-07:00Your Movie is Bad and You Should Feel BadHatred and bile with a smile!Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.comBlogger99125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-22857597410961122242022-06-10T23:01:00.000-07:002022-06-10T23:01:23.078-07:00Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]--><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Resident Evil: Apocalypse</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"> is the worst movie made since <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Resident Evil</i>.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Director’s Wife Kate Beckinsale is
back as Selene, a spindly white woman who wears black leather and kicks a bunch
of people. She’s a vampire, which is why she’s only ever seen at night shooting
people with machineguns as vampires are wont to do. The Fanged Ones have a
blood feud (ha) with the lycans aka werewolves, which is why Kate kills them
with perfectly normal non-silver bullets and knives. In the first movie Kate
killed one of the three vampire elders or gods or whatever, so now, she tells
us, the vampires will come after her, too. They never do, though. It’s that
kind of movie.<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Kate is joined by living wax dummy
Trunk Slamchest, a vampire-werewolf hybrid who was the Macguffin of the
previous film. Yes, he’s a vampire-werewolf hybrid. A vamwolf, if you will. Kate
exposits that Lump Beefbroth is unique, that there has never been a hybrid
before, and that his power might be unlimited. (Doesn’t the first bit imply the
second bit?) Because he was vamped in the last movie, Gristle McThornbody has
to drink blood to survive. He’s not down with the whole blood-drinking thing, but
Kate insists, “Normal food might kill you.” She leaves to do some vampire stuff
and Slab Awesomefist immediately goes to a pub and orders a plate of potatoes
that he barfs up after maybe 2 bites. Not the brightest bulb in the pack, our Big
McLargeHuge, but I for one applaud the actor for his convincing performance as
a vamwolf that eats potatoes and pukes.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Meanwhile, the bad guy from the last
film brings a few goons to murder Marcus, the First and therefore Most Powerful
vampire of them all. No, they don’t bring stakes or knives but instead the
traditional vampire hunters’ weapon of choice: machineguns. Haven’t you read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dracula</i>? The Count went down under a
hail of automatic weapons fire. I’m sure I’m remembering that right.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">“Ah ha!” I hear you shout at your
phone as you prepare to smugly correct the smartass author of a blog no one
reads, “the first movie had UV bullets, so they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">can</i> machinegun vampires to death!” Yeah but these guys forgot to
bring those, I guess, since they shoot Marcus over and over and he just kills
them all. Yep, the villain of the last movie, who somehow made it to this one,
is unceremoniously dispatched 15 minutes in. I haven’t seen an anticlimax like
that since the last guy who went to bed with Tomi Lahren. Marcus has the
ability to see <strike>clips from the previous movie</strike> people’s memories by drinking
their blood, because as we all learned in Science! class, that’s where memories
are stored. And no, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">obviously</i></span> <span style="font-size: 12pt;">Marcus doesn’t see those events from the victim’s
perspective, that would require shooting new scenes and do you know how much
work it is to shoot a scene? You have to like point the camera at actors and
shit, it’s hard. Marcus decides he’s going to free his brother William, the
First and therefore Most Powerful of the werewolves, imprisoned lo these 800
years because Billy couldn’t control his savagery and was just eating <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">everybody</i>. Why does Marcus want to do
this? So he and Bill can be godbros and Take Over The World. Why didn’t Marcus
do this oh, say, about 8 centuries ago? Because the movie’s happening now, why
did you even ask.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Marcus somehow knows Bulk Vanderhuge
is at the pub, so he goes there to obtain the key to Billy’s prison. Kate
somehow knows both that this is happening and where, even though she left
before Rip Stigface decided to go to the pub. People just kind of know things
when the movie needs them to. All three characters end up getting shot, but
since they’re all vampires or hybrids or some damn thing they just shrug it off.
Kate helps Smoke Manmuscle hulk up by letting him drink some of her blood
(that’s…not how vampirism works), and he uses his awesome power to shoot Marcus
with his machine pistol, disabling him while he and Kate flee in a truck. Guns
just sort of work on vampires and werewolves, or don’t, as the movie needs them
to. And man, that unlimited power sure is making itself known, eh, what with
how he shot Marcus with a gun he had. No mere <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mortal</i> could shoot a guy. But alas! Marcus has a winged demon form,
and he flies onto the truck and there’s more fighting and more injuries that
don’t actually cause any harm. “Dead or alive, you will tell me what I want to
know!” Marcus screams at Kate. Genius, it might help if you told her what it is
that you want to know.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Finally Marcus gets to the point in
the script where it says the heroes get away, so he stops chasing them. Slate
Slabrock asks Kate if Marcus is a hybrid, and she replies yes. Okay so earlier
Slate was unique and there had never been a hybrid before, but now the First
Vampire is a hybrid(?). Right so there was never a hybrid vampire before Slate,
and the first ever vampire to exist…was a hybrid. Makes sense if you don’t
think about it. Kate is slightly burned on the hand and face by sunlight, so
they park inside an abandoned building and Brick Hardmeat light-proofs it for
her (including one shot where you can clearly see the sunlight shining on her
head and shoulder). He runs to get some first aid to treat Kate’s wounds.
Treat. Kate’s. Wounds. With a first aid kit. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She’s a vampire, you colossal dope!</i> She will heal any wound. You
spent the entire last movie learning this shit. Oh and <i>you are also a
vampire</i> and at this very moment you have no injuries even though you just got
shot in the chest a dozen times and run over by a truck. Christ.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Then they have PG-13 sex because
even though the movie’s rated R, Kate’s not exposing her goods for this crap no
matter what her hubby says. Now this is absolutely moronic for a number of
reasons. First, we all know that thematically vampirism stands in for
repression of sexual desire, which totally goes out the window when you have
vampires having actual se—I kid, this is a Len Wiseman movie, subtlety and
metaphor are right out. Okay then, second, vampires are dead and have no
heartbeat or blood flow, so Crud Bonemeal won’t be performing, if you know what
I mean and I think you do. And even if you posit that he’s a vamwolf so he can
still rock the red rocket, Kate’s a regular vampire so she won’t have the
necessary blood flow to even have sexual desire. Unless she does have a beating
heart. And blood carrying hormones to her living brain. Which is affected by those
hormones just as a normal human brain would be. In which case she wouldn’t be a
vampire at all but just a super-powered person…hey!<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Kate decides to visit vampire lore
expert Tanis Half-Elven to figure out why Marcus has gone all killy on his own
vampire clan. Tanis was exiled 300 years ago, and no one has seen him or heard
from him since. Buck Plankchest asks how they’re going to find him given all
that, and Kate replies, “I’m the one who exiled him.” Okay…and? How is that an
answer to his question? Does the screenwriter—yes, this movie was actually
written, by an actual human being—know what exile is? Just because you sent him
away, even to a specific place, doesn’t mean he’s still there 300 years later.
So they go to his house, and yep he’s still there having had contact with no
one. Is it me or is this less exile and more imprisonment? The house is guarded
by lycans, two of whom Kate easily dispatches with ordinary knives. Werewolves
are immune to non-silver metals, or aren’t, as the movie needs them to. Then
she sees two scantily clad women in a hallway and immediately murders them.
Yes, they were vampires and were approaching her with the intention of defending
Tanis, but how did <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kate</i> know that? She
attacks them before they do anything but walk slowly toward her! It turns out
Tanis Half-Elven is the one who came up with the UV bullets that helped the
lycans finally start doing real damage in the vampire/lycan war. Boy,
vampire-killing bullets sure will come in handy against Marcus.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">(They don’t take any of the UV
bullets.)</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">(Nor is Tanis armed with
them when Marcus shows up in the very next scene and kills him.) </span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">(Stupid movie.)</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Tanis says there’s a second key and
that Kate is the only one still alive who knows where Bill’s prison is, so she
and Splint Chesthair absolutely <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">must</i>
escape Marcus because he’s stronger than them and can get the first key from Punch
Sideiron and the prison’s location from Kate. Tanis points them to Dad
Immortal, the father of Marcus and Billy who is neither a werewolf nor a
vampire but is immortal because he just is okay and don’t ask why. That's right, Dad sired both the world's first vampire <i>and</i> the world's first werewolf. I guess they had different mothers. Dad has
watched the entire centuries-long war between the vampires and lycans and the
800-year imprisonment of Bill and has done fuck-all about it because he loves
his sons and doesn’t want to kill them. Well Daddy-O, you’re clearly okay with
the eternal imprisonment of one son (which seems a lot more cruel than death,
frankly), so why didn’t you just lock up Marcus, too? Then stopping the war
wouldn't mean killing either son. Stupid movie. It turns out
Dad has the second key. Pretty convenient for Marcus that the 3 people who have
the 3 things he needs to carry out his evil plan have all gathered in one
place. Marc shows up, kills Dirk Hardpec, and takes his key, and instead of
running away Kate attacks him and gets beat down like the 2008 Lions, allowing
him to learn Bill’s location from her blood. So well done Kate, way to keep
your eye on the prize. Marcus then mortally wounds Dad, takes the second key,
and demon-flies off to free his wolf-bro. Dad tells Kate to drink his blood and
gain his power. </span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">What
</span></i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">power? The power…to be killed by
Marcus? Dad never displayed any power apart from not dying of old age, yet
somehow Kate taking his power will make her able to beat Marcus, confirming
that Dad could’ve killed Marcus but just didn’t want to. He’s okay with giving
Kate the power to do it, though. I guess giving someone else the ability kill
his son is different from killing him directly, but yeesh, the old geezer
could’ve prevented a lot of suffering and death over the last 8 centuries if
he’d had the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">huevos</i> to just whack his
monster-kids.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Marcus goes to the prison and frees
Bill, who attacks him until Marcus says, “It’s me, Marcus!” so he stops. It
turns out Bill can’t control his savagery except when he can. Kate arrives in a
helicopter with Blast Thickneck’s corpse (gee, I can’t possibly see where this
is going) and some Expendable Meat soldiers who worked for Dad and now
apparently work for Kate because she’s their boss now she decided. One of these
guys is played by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mann_(musician)" target="_blank">Spirit of the West</a>, the CAG in the reimagined <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Battlestar Galactica</i> miniseries. That
this random Canadian folk singer playing a thankless “sir-yes-sir” role turns
in by far the film’s best performance physically pains me. Not because the
guy’s not a decent actor (he is), but because Bill fucking Nighy is in this
movie. I know Nighy is slumming it in this trash, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">good god </i>his performance is abominable. Nicolas Cage would tell
Nighy that he’s a bit over the top. So thank you Spirit of the West for lending
a little class and dignity to a movie that doesn’t deserve it. You left us too
soon.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Let’s wrap this up. Wolfman Jack
kills all the soldiers, Marcus crashes the helicopter into the prison complex
(yet its rotor continues to turn as if it’s still running, stupid movie), and
it looks like Kate, despite her Dad-blood upgrade, faces certain defeat, in
part because the script says her non-silver bullets don’t hurt the Big Bad Wolf.
Suddenly, just when we most expect it, Blast Hardcheese springs back to life
and kills Werewolf of London in about 8 seconds flat. Some wolf god he turned
out to be. I can see why the whole movie was about how Marcus couldn’t be
allowed to let him out. I mean, he was a threat to like half a dozen people for
upwards of a few minutes. The movie even gives us a replay of Kate saying Smash
Lampjaw is unique and there’s never been a hybrid before. Except of course for Marcus
who is currently in the same room, but who’s counting? Marcy-Marc impales Kate
through the heart with blade tentacles that spring from his back, but even
though he killed Dad this exact same way earlier, Kate doesn’t die and shoves
Marcus into the rotors that are inexplicably still</span> <span style="font-size: 12pt;">spinning. So Dad-blood gave Kate the power to survive a
wound that Dad himself couldn’t survive? Whatever, Kate gets some voiceover
about hope for the future and we’re out.</span></span></p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p style="text-align: left;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">Lots of
IMdb reviews for <i>Resident Evil: Apocalypse</i> say that if you enjoyed the
first movie, you’ll enjoy this sequel. And man, I can’t think of a more damning
statement than that.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: Calibri;">
<span></span></span>Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-75515575348204011162021-08-07T02:28:00.001-07:002021-08-07T02:28:26.371-07:00This is How You DON'T Play Mass Effect 3 Legendary Edition<iframe style="background-image:url(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zyDK1r1xQ_E/hqdefault.jpg)" width="480" height="270" src="https://youtube.com/embed/zyDK1r1xQ_E" frameborder="0"></iframe>Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-11026949443481460722019-10-11T03:20:00.000-07:002019-10-11T03:20:20.907-07:00This is How You Don't Play Mass Effect 3Okay, I know this isn't the usual fare around here, but the point is to make fun of what's bad and its makers who should also feel bad, right? So here's my epic 2 1/2 hour takedown of DarkSydePhil's unwatchably bad playthrough of <i>Mass Effect 3</i>. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you This is How You Don't Play <i>Mass Effect 3</i>:<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ksvrBvp-fjk" width="560"></iframe><br />Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-9040369181191379582017-11-06T01:19:00.000-08:002017-11-14T23:11:12.499-08:00Fifty Shades of Gray<i>Fifty Shades of Gray</i> is the shittiest turd shat out of Satan's fiery dickhole. It's an insult to women, the <strike>Holy</strike> English language, softcore pornography, BDSM, victims of abuse, the craft of writing, trees, the phonetic alphabet, lips and the biting thereof, young incredibly hot super-rich white guys...okay maybe not that last one.<br />
<b></b><br />
Forget Frances Farmer, it's E.L. "Snowqueen's Icedragon" James who has had <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZgtMchcOy0">her revenge on Seattle</a> for making it the setting of the worst fanfiction since <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Immortal_(fan_fiction)">"My Immortal"</a>. See James had herself a think one day: "I love <i>Twilight</i>, but it doesn't have <i>quite</i> enough misogyny and abusive control of female sexuality. I'd better crank the woman-hate <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to_eleven">up to 11</a> and out-Stevenie Meyer Stevenie Meyer by writing an even <i>moar</i> virginal, passive, blank-slate nonentity of a fauxtagonist and an even <i>moar</i> controlling, stalker-y, rich and powerful Real Man to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump">grab her by the pussy</a> because <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming">she's asking for it</a>." And behold, it was done, and then Stormcloud's Lightningsalamander realized that catering to fetishes is big money, so she took her masterpiece down from free sites, did a Find-Replace for "Edward" and "Bella", and bob's your uncle, Britain's fastest-selling paperback of all time. And of course Hollywood sharks were drawn to the smell of green in the water, and so we get two hours of Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson) and Christian "Not A Sparkly Vampire" Gray (Jamie Dornan) pretending to fuck. <br />
<br />
That fetish, of course, is incredibly steamy, kinky <strike>domination-submission</strike> biting women's lower lips. Ladies, if your fetish is to drive a man wild so that he'll fuck you any time, anywhere, every time you bite your lower lip, this is the movie for you! Though he doesn't like it when you do that, because <i>he </i>wants to do it. Except he desires you when <i>you </i>do it. It's that kind of movie.<br />
<br />
Allow me to give you a synopsis of the plot: Girl meets boy, boy demands a nondisclosure agreement and signed contract in order to fuck, girl refuses contract, boy fucks girl, boy and girl talk about fucking, boy fucks girl, boy and girl talk about fucking, boy fucks girl, boy and girl talk about fucking, boy fucks girl, boy and girl talk about fucking, boy belt-whips girl, girl leaves boy. The End.<br />
<br />
And if you don't like all them thar f-words, don't blame me. This is the language chosen by Rainmaker's Dewhamster. Not that your old pal Carl Eusebius minds bad language. I mean, you <i>have</i> read this blog, right? What I do mind is writing like this: "I don't make love. I fuck. Hard." That Anastasia didn't immediately laugh and kick Christian in the jimmy upon hearing this line made me instantly lose the zero respect I had for her up until this point.<br />
<br />
The movie is a teensy improvement over the book--how could it possibly <i>not</i> be--yet is somehow worse since we're watching poor Jamie Dornan trying to bring Christian "Ted Bundy" Gray to life as written. The movie even begins on him and occasionally shows things from his perspective, which is already an improvement over the book. A book, written entirely in the first-person present-tense (you know, the way I wrote fiction when I was <i>eight</i>), that includes such adult dialogue as "his erection, holy cow", "holy crap", "double crap", "I must be the color of the <i>Communist Manifesto</i>", "You. Are. So. Sweet.", "my very small inner goddess sways in a gentle victorious samba", "very varied", "He's so good at sex", "Christian's mood is almost tangible"...I could go on. At least the movie drops most of the howler lines, though it does keep "holy crap", that "I don't make love" line, and "I'm fifty shades of fucked up" (lolwut?). Still, it more than makes up for with the materialism porn, with loving shots of entire garages full of luxury cars, personal helicopters, and enormous $10,000-a-month apartments. Ladies, if a man is nothing more than a dong and a fat wallet to you, this is your movie!<br />
<br />
I don't want to beat up on the actors too much, since both Johnson and Dornan get way more out of this crap than the script, a shockingly literal interpretation of the book, deserves. What little identification with and feeling you have for these characters is entirely due to the actors' performances. They're both at their best in the final scenes, when Ana realizes she can never truly please Christian in the sack. Which, since their relationship is based <i>entirely</i> on sex, kind of hurts their chances. Still, while Johnson looks like she has something behind her eyes apart from empty air and is suitably Hollywood-plain (if still disturbingly thin, such that you can see her rib cage whenever she lifts her arms over her head, eww), Dornan doesn't bring anything like the slick charm and charisma Christian is supposed to exude. Think Christian Bale in <i>American Psycho</i>, and you'll be thinking of a <i>good</i> movie instead of this junk. Book Christian's expression is supposed to turn hard and cold when he goes into his alleged scary "dominant" phase, but Dornan either doesn't try or utterly fails to convey this. I'm reminded of the opening scene in <i>Memento</i>, when Leonard and Teddy are talking just before Teddy's murder. Teddy is laughing at and taunting Leonard until Leonard's expression subtly changes, and both Teddy and the audience instantly know he's just reached that dark, inhuman place one has to enter in order to murder someone in cold blood. Dornan never does that, so we don't get any of the real danger the book tells us Anastasia feels. Maybe the director figured out Book Christian is a fucking psychopath every woman should avoid like a men's rights activist.<br />
<br />
Speaking of being goddamn psycho, stop me when Christian gets scary enough for you to run away and get a thousand restraining orders:<br />
1) After meeting you and having a conversation with you lasting all of four minutes, he finds out where you work and shows up unannounced.<br />
2) He asks you to coffee, then says you'll never see him again.<br />
3) Upon your drunk-dialing him, the second thing out of his mouth is "Where are you?"<br />
4) Upon your hanging up on him, he calls back to say he's tracked your location by your cell phone and is coming to get you.<br />
5) He actually comes to get you.<br />
6) He gallantly takes your falling-down-drunk and then unconscious ass <strike>home</strike> to <i>his</i> place.<br />
7) He undresses you while you're passed out.<br />
8) He sleeps next to your unconscious form in his bed.<br />
9) He gets all smug and self-satisfied answering no when you ask him if he raped you.<br />
10) His personal servant shows up with a new bra and panties set that fits you perfectly.<br />
11) He's a billionaire who regularly eats at IHOP. <br />
12) He's good friends with the pedophile rapist who abused him for six years and actually says to you, "I don't understand why you feel you have to demonize her."(!!)<br />
13) He wants to watch you have a gynecological exam. Given by his personal doctor. Whom he brought to his home specifically to examine you.<br />
14) He shakes hands with his father.<br />
15) While visiting your mother in Georgia, you text him "Wish you were here" and he flies across the country that night to show up the next day in your hotel's lounge and then watches you there for a while before creepily revealing his presence.<br />
16) He doesn't like Britney Spears's "Toxic". <br />
17) You feel he's abusing you, wants to hurt you, and uses sex as a weapon against you.<br />
<br />
Personally I'd run screaming to the cops at 1). Okay, I cheated a bit, since a few of those are from the book. But most of them, and the most egregious ones (except for hating "Toxic"), remain in the film. And so does the softcore sex. So if you want to see lots of either naked Johnson or Dornan (but not Dornan's johnson), this is your movie.<br />
<br />
As another wonderful and actually serious <a href="https://www.flickfilosopher.com/">movie reviewer</a> noted in <a href="https://www.flickfilosopher.com/2015/02/fifty-shades-grey-movie-review-neurotica.html">her review</a>, the problem with this movie isn't the sex. It's not even real BDSM. For anyone who thinks it is, allow me to give you another list. Here are all the sexual acts in this movie:<br />
<br />
<b></b>
Vaginal intercourse<br />
Fellatio<br />
Cunnilingus (these three grouped together as "vanilla")<br />
the lightest possible bondage<br />
blindfolding<br />
spanking <br />
ice play<br />
beating with a belt<br />
<br />
<br />
Now I've told my regular readers (all two of you) that my high school clique was The Gamers. So I was hardly <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3rfAjpHOyI">A Goddamned Sexual Tyrannosaurus</a>. Yet with the exception of that last one (which is the <i>last thing</i> that happens in the movie, after which Anastasia breaks up with Christian), I did all of these things and more <i>in high school</i>. I mean, when your sex life is less kinky than the high school valedictorian's, you ain't BDSM. In fact, this movie (and the book much more so) depict BDSM as deviant, wrong, a result of abuse, a trauma to be overcome. In the book Ana even talks about Christian leading her to "dark places" and speculates on whether or not she can bring him "into the light". And Christian is a terrible dominant, since he's trying to force a woman who isn't submissive into becoming so. This isn't my analysis, folks. Our, uh, "characters" say it <i>several </i>times, with Christian flat out stating Anastasia isn't submissive and never will be. I'm no expert on BDSM, but I'm pretty sure that's not how it's supposed to work. And these people drink fucking <i>constantly</i>. In almost every scene, people are drinking, very often to the point of drunkenness, and Christian routinely <strike>gets Anastasia drunk so he can have his sexual way with her</strike> provides Anastasia with glass after glass of the finest wines. I mean yer old pal Carl Eusebius is a bloody alcoholic and I was wondering how any of these characters has a liver left. Christ.<br />
<br />
<i>Fifty Shades of Gray</i> is an
anti-feminist celebration of male privilege and female naivete and virginity, a toothless
fake wannabe transgression that's so vanilla Rick James would be happy <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYHxGBH6o4M">to take it home to mother</a>. On behalf of all the perfectly normal, mentally solid, happy practitioners of BDSM, fuck this movie and the shitty fanfic it was based on.*<br />
<br />
<br />
========================================== <br />
<br />
* Not that BDSM practitioners need me to speak for them. I just want to add my voice to the chorus.<br />
<b></b>Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-4160761815560392412017-07-24T01:09:00.000-07:002017-07-24T21:16:55.824-07:00Red SkyI hope you enjoyed the spittle-flecked ranting about movies fucking up the military in my last review, because you'll be getting it cranked up to 11 here. Yep, I'm reviewing the finest US-Russian co-produced low-budget airplane porn that sports both godawful CGI and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0003534/?ref_=fn_al_ch_1">President</a> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0008868/?ref_=tt_cl_t4">Lone Starr</a> ever made.<i> </i><br />
<br />
<i>Red Sky</i> is a shitty mash-up of <i>Top Gun</i> (sure) and <i>Iron Eagle II</i> (Jesus, <i>why</i>?) starring <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Van_Peebles">New Jack City</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam_Gigandet">Twilight Douchebag</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachael_Leigh_Cook">Jaesa Willsaam</a>. Sadly it's Light Side Jaesa, so those of us (and we know who we are) hoping to see her forget exactly whether she slept with, murdered, or slept with and then murdered a guy she picked up in a bar will have to look elsewhere.<br />
<br />
Ditto those of us hoping to see a good movie.<br />
<br />
I'm not sure why the filmmakers bothered to hire actual actors who probably ate up budget dollars that should've gone toward making the terrible CGI airplanes slightly less terrible. Okay, New Jack City directed the thing (and so had the clout to give himself the best role), but why hire Jaesa? Why get somebody who can act and then give her an entirely superfluous role where the only time she seems to understand her function in the scene is when she's fawning over the lead actor or having sex with him--wait, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman">objection withdrawn</a>. Fortunately for fans of terrible acting we've got Twilight Douchebag to perform a fucking master class in it, demonstrating every possible way <i>not</i> to give a performance. He overacts, he's wooden, he appears confused and without direction, he portrays the wrong emotion, he portrays no emotion, he projects zero charisma or screen presence--whatever the scene doesn't call for, he provides in spades. Lone Starr looks like he'd rather be anywhere else, and by God I wanted to send him there. The rest of the cast merely exist, playing their one-dimensional roles with all the passion and skill they honed in community theater.<br />
<br />
We open on scary, suspenseful music as a group of musclebound knuckleheads move through the darkness and then draw a cat nose and whiskers on a sleeping guy. The k-heads are constantly yammering and shining their flashlights in Guy's face, so he must be passed out drunk not to wake up immediately. Then I cringe as the camera reveals Guy is wearing a flight suit. <i>These guys </i>are the movie's ace pilots? Somebody get Cthulhu on the line so It can go ahead and devour humanity now. <span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>Cthulhu fhtagn</i></span>. And looks like I was right about Guy being passed out drunk. I mean, why else would he be sleeping in bed with his flight suit on? None of the other k-heads is wearing one, so it ain't like they're on alert or anything. Guy suddenly wakes up and yells terrible dialogue at his "friends", but it's okay, they finished drawing the whiskers already. Whew! That was...<i>too close</i>.<br />
<br />
Cut to a briefing the next morning, with all the k-heads in attendance, including Guy...<i>with the cat whiskers still on his face!</i> Oh boy, here we go with the ranting. So if you didn't know, guys in the military shave. Every day. At least, every day they have to show up for work. It's the law. Seriously, it's military law that you have to shave. So there's no way Guy wouldn't see the shit on his face. Even if he didn't think he needed to shave that day, he'd check. He'd check his uniform in the mirror to make sure all the doodads were on right and it wasn't wrinkled or stained, especially since officers (which pilots are) are extra scrupulous about their appearance. But I don't know why I'm harping on this so much, since everybody in the briefing room--including the guy in charge, a major(!)--has hair so far out of regs <a href="http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0001843/?ref_=fn_al_ch_1">Mr. Strickland</a> would give them all detention. If your budget doesn't extend to getting the actors haircuts, you should probably reconsider making your film.<br />
<br />
We're next introduced to all of our characters through the tried-and-true bad movie technique of putting their names up on the screen. Yeah, fuck introducing characters through dialogue. Just digitally flash their names in front of us <i>while they're wearing helmets and strapping oxygen masks over the lower half of their faces</i>, and we'll know them all like our own fathers. Hilariously, the two pilots played by "name" actors (Twilight Douchebag and somebody called "Shane West") get full names; the community theater troupe members only get last names. Wow, way to connect me to these people, movie. (<b>Future Carl</b>: Everybody's full name is listed in the end credits. So they bothered to come up with first names for the other characters but never told the audience? What gives?)<br />
<br />
The movie betrays its love for <i>Iron Eagle</i> by calling its lead character Butch "Cobra" Masters(!!). Really? <i>Iron Eagle</i>? A film series even recovering airplane porn addict Carl Eusebius recognizes as a steaming pile of ass? "Cobra" is a lame call sign that's still too dignified for Twilight Douchebag. I hereby dub him "D-Bag".<br />
<br />
D-Bag and Shane West (call sign: "Rodeo"), along with their WSOs, get into their <i>really fucking obviously</i> <i>phony </i>cockpits while stock footage of an aircraft carrier shows us actual F/A-18 Hornets preparing for launch. Then really bad CGI Hornets take off, ripping off the iconic "aileron roll with the carrier in the background" shot from <i>Top Gun</i>, if that shot were hilariously cheap CGI instead of a real aircraft taking off from a real carrier.<br />
<br />
And then...oh, the stupid. The stupid, <i>it hurts</i>. The boys get a call from New Jack City on the ground, identifying himself as "Warlord 2". NJC orders them to destroy a building...somewhere. They demand the authorization code (the what now?), which they receive. D-Bag protests that the mission was simply to patrol. Rodeo counters that the code is good, so he tries to shoot the building. His missiles don't work(?), so D-Bag has to do it. He does. It turns out it's an American building, or Americans are there, or something, and a single "soldier" (remember that) is killed. The superweapon (come on, you knew there had to be a superweapon) is gone. Or destroyed? Or maybe it was never there? Who knows? (Well, the audience knows, since we see NJC order his people to go to the ruins and steal it.)<br />
<br />
This authorization code business is some shit the writers made up to hide that fact that in the real world their stupid plot would never work. Unless you're under immediate attack, you don't just run over to a fighter plane and take it up in the air. You meet with your superiors, in which they carefully and in excruciating detail explain everything anyone could possibly need to know about the mission, and more besides. This is done in something called a "briefing". You know, <i>that thing we just saw in the previous scene</i>? In which the pilots were presumably told that their mission was to patrol? So there's no way in hell they'd then be told, <i>in the air, in the middle of their mission</i>, to go perform a totally different mission. I mean, they probably wouldn't even have the appropriate weapons to carry it out. Then there's fuel considerations....Look, the target isn't another jet, or a missile, or even a fucking <i>truck</i>, you know, something that <i>moves</i>. It's a building. Last time I checked, buildings don't drive away while you prep and launch a strike using pilots who have been told what the fuck they're supposed to do <i>before</i> they take a pair of $30 million planes in the air.<br />
<br />
And remember my chain of command rant? I mean, <i>come on</i>. Fucking nobody, and certainly not elite Navy pilots flying planes carrying actual live weapons, takes orders from <i>some asshole they've never heard of</i>. Orders that contradict the instructions they were given by, you know, their <i>actual commanders</i>. Orders that require them to <i>use their weapons</i>.<i> </i>Against a target, they don't even know what it is. From a guy, they don't even know who <i>he</i> is. No way. Pilots, like everybody else in the military, take orders from their commanders. The ones on, you know, their carrier. The carrier they're in constant radio contact with (if not directly, then through an electronic warfare aircraft that would be coordinating this stuff). Which would allow them to perhaps question these strange orders, by saying something like "Who the fuck is Warlord 2, and where he'd get the <i>cajones</i> to radio me up and change my mission?"<br />
<br />
But Tweedledum and Tweedledumber don't think of any of that, and they're all "Sure New Jack City, we'll go blow it up real gud for ya there, eh?" They're court-martialed. And let me make this very clear: They <i>absolutely should be</i>. And they should be found guilty. The movie acts like there being a real Warlord 2 exonerates them, but it
doesn't. At all. Whoever Warlord 2 was, he wasn't in their chain of
command. So any order from him carries no weight. That means they <i>did </i>violate their orders, they <i>did</i> fire their weapons without authorization, and these actions <i>did</i> result in a friendly fire incident.<br />
<br />
In another hilarious bit, the knuckleheads' lawyer objects to a question asked to Rodeo, only for Rodeo to tell the judge that he will answer it(!), which he then proceeds to do(!!). Goddamn it, movie, there's an <i>objection</i> on the floor. The judge has to <i>rule</i> on it before anything else can happen. The witness can't just decide to answer a question that's been objected to. Good grief, forget <i>Law & Order</i>, you could watch an episode of fucking <i>Matlock</i> and know that! And not that it matters--since the knuckleheads are <i>absolutely guilty of the crime they've been accused of</i>--but Lawyer never once raises the question of motive. Why, exactly, would 'Dum and 'Dumber want to blow up an American installation, and why would they come up with such a ridiculous cover story? I know they have the IQ of a brick between the two of them, else they wouldn't be in this situation in the first place, but at least ask why they didn't come up with something more reasonable than "a guy we didn't know told us to".<br />
<br />
It doesn't matter though, because it turns out the prosecutor (Lone Starr) doesn't have the "HUD tapes" that contain all the information from their instruments, including radio communications of Warlord 2 giving them the order. Lone Starr remarks that this is convenient for 'Dum and 'Dumber. Err...it is? Isn't it equally convenient for <strike>the plot</strike> Warlord 2? No one knows what's on the tapes, so how does Lone Starr know they won't corroborate what the knuckleheads said? Anyway, the judge--the worst actor in the movie, which is saying something--says that without the tapes there's no case, and so 'Dum and 'Dumber, and their WSOs, should resign, and if Lone Starr is feeling nice, they'll get general discharges.<br />
<br />
<br />
....the hell?!<br />
<br />
<i>You just said you don't have the evidence to convict them, you asshat!</i> So why would they get general discharges? They can only get those if they did something wrong, and you've just admitted you have no case. You didn't say, "We've got good evidence, just not enough to convict you in a court-martial." You said <i>no case</i>. And what's Lone Starr got to do with it? He's just a lawyer. He doesn't have any say in how their discharge from the Navy would be characterized. Even the <i>judge</i> doesn't have that authority. Only the knuckleheads' commander does. Plus, what's with resigning? The point of resigning is to get
somebody out without having to throw her out. But a general discharge
is how you throw someone out. You don't need them to resign to do that. So why wouldn't they fight
rather than resign, when the result of fighting couldn't be worse? And really, I can't see how they wouldn't win that fight, since it would look like exactly what it is: their commander punishing them even though the court-martial failed to convict. <br />
<br />
But the Plot-o-Matic will not be denied, so the knuckleheads all resign and get general discharges. Rodeo acts like a total ass to everybody and breaks off his engagement with Jaesa because she's too close to D-Bag (though West's and Douchebag's acting gives the distinct impression that Rodeo's jealous of <i>her</i>, if you know what I mean). Then we see a TV news report of the American 'Dum and 'Dumber killed, and <i>he's clearly wearing a Marine uniform and so was not a soldier goddamn it you could read the Wikipedia article on the Marine Corps and know that</i>. Now, journalists may not care much about the difference between a soldier and a Marine, but earlier it was Lone Starr who called the dead guy a soldier, and the military does care about that shit. So Lone Starr would definitely know Dead Guy should not be referred to as a "soldier", since Lone Starr is a pretty high-ranking officer and a lawyer and oh yeah <i>he's in the fucking Navy which the Marines are sorta part of.</i> (They're also sorta independent. It's weird.)<br />
<br />
Anyway, flash forward seven years, and the knuckleheads now work together in the private sector, except D-Bag, who lives in a broken-down old plane that's decorated entirely in pictures and drawings and models of planes. Do you get that D-Bag likes airplanes? Because it's really important to the filmmakers that you do. In case the movie is too subtle for you in how it limns this rich characterization, D-Bag likes flying planes and he's sad now that he doesn't fly planes. I really hope that message is coming through. Rodeo disappears suddenly, and D-Bag refuses to help his friends look for him. Then he goes to Russia since a Russian company helped finance this turkey, and he just happens in that tiny city known as Moscow to randomly bump into Jaesa, who sadly doesn't run him through with a double-bladed lightsaber. (Now I'm <i>really</i> missing Dark Side Jaesa.) And yes, despite being young, smart, professionally successful, and adept in the Force, Jaesa even after seven years still carries a torch for D-Bag and isn't married or even involved with anyone. Sure. Forget the airplane stuff, <i>this</i> is the least believable thing in the movie. Then D-Bag goes back to his plane-house, and Lone Starr re-enters the movie to get the plot going. He wants D-Bag to lead the other two knuckleheads, plus some, uh, other guys, to blow up the superweapon in a black ops "we disavow any knowledge of this mission" mission. Their reward? Honorable discharges. No, not money or reinstatement into the Navy or retirement benefits. Just a "you done gud kid" from the Navy. Pretty weak tea to risk your life for, but if D-Bag says no there's no movie, so he agrees. Jaesa does some digging to find out just how super the superweapon is so that she can magically appear in Syria to tell the k-heads how totally dangerous and super it is when it's time to ramp up the tension before the climactic dogfight.<br />
<br />
Lone Starr's plan gets cocked up immediately because it turns out NJC is a CIA agent and even after seven years nobody's figured out he works for the bad guys. (I wish I could call bullshit on that, but <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames">considering</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen">the CIA's</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katrina_Leung">track record</a> of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Wu-Tai_Chin">discovering</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_James_Nicholson">double agents</a>.....) Of course in the end it all comes down to a dogfight between the k-heads and their bro Rodeo, who's also been working for the bad guys the whole time. Rodeo is apparently better than anybody else at the whole fighter pilot thing, since not only can he consistently hit with his plane's cannon, he always manages to <i>shoot holes in the other plane's canopy without killing the guys in the cockpit</i>. Yes, <i>on purpose</i>. That's some fucking accurate gunfire right there. But then D-Bag reveals that the superweapon will kill lotsa people, and Rodeo <i>immediately</i> does a face-turn and reveals the location of the superweapon before crashing his own plane to stop the terrorist guy in his back seat from launching it, I guess. D-Bag flies to the location, but it turns out it's not the real location but a trap. NJC's waiting for him with a portable surface-to-air missile launcher, and he shoots the plane down with it. The end.<br />
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Then D-Bag appears and shoots NJC. Wait, <i>what</i>? Okay, so I guess D-Bag and his boy bailed out of the plane even though we clearly saw that they didn't, but <i>how the fuck did they get to where NJC is</i>? They'd have been floating back to the ground on parachutes for <i>miles</i>! And since NJC lied to Rodeo about where the superweapon was, where is it? The movie just cuts to Rodeo's funeral, where we're told D-Bag destroyed the superweapon. Uh, how? With what, his pistol? How did he figure out its actual location? NJC sure didn't tell him. Ah well, whatever, let's just end this stupid movie. Blah blah unfunny comic relief, the surviving k-heads get their honorable discharges from Lone Starr, roll credits.<br />
<br />
And at no point does anything about a red sky even <i>come up</i>. They should've called this movie <i>Generic Airplane-Related Title</i>.Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-55647685166706586652017-06-27T00:02:00.000-07:002017-07-27T20:18:59.883-07:00Fire From BelowNo, not <i>Fire Down Below</i>. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119123/?ref_=nv_sr_1"><i>That </i>one</a> is lunkheaded action movie has-been-who-never-shoulda-been pompous religious nutjob Steven Seagal's brain-dead pseudo-environmentalist film. <i>This </i>one is lunkheaded action movie has-been-who-never-shoulda-been pompous
religious nutjob Kevin Sorbo's brain-dead pseudo-environmentalist film. Put these two knuckleheads together and the gravity well of anti-acting will warp the very fabric of spacetime.<br />
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I recommend <i>Fire From Below</i> for anyone who needs to recalibrate her brain's logic circuits by watching something so preposterous it forces a master reset. This is a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syfy">Siffy</a> movie about sentient fire that's attracted to water and stalks and murders people like a flying snake monster. Yes, fire. Attracted to water.<br />
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Four words that are the harbingers of your doom: directed by Jim Wynorski. The man is such a titanic asshole that he <a href="https://twitter.com/Foywonder">slags people on the Internet who praise his films</a> and is truly one of the world's lamest directors, because he always sucks in the same way and has none of the charming dedication to making artistic films despite an utter lack of artistic talent: your Ed Woods, your Bruno Matteis, your Neil Breens. Still, Sorbo's acting as executive producer makes the film even shittier. Is there nothing this man can't ruin? And since he's executive producer, how the hell did he allow himself to go on camera with his hair like that?<br />
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The credits hold moar terrors. Apparently two different people play "the sheriff", as displayed on screen. Either that, or the people who made this movie don't know how credits work. Then we get "Burton Gilliam as 'Bubba'". Yes, "Bubba" is in quotation marks. Now first, there's never been a good movie with a character named Bubba, nor shall there ever be. Second, who the fuck is Burton Gilliam? Or is the character and not the actor being spotlighted? The character with a stupid name, a dirty hat, and a face like a road accident, who exists solely to sexual harass a woman and then take a piss on camera before being blowed up real gud.<br />
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So the bad guy in the movie is a sleazy corporate executive type, who develops fire that zeros in on moisture because that somehow makes it specifically target people. Which are the only things you typically encounter that have any moisture in them. We're introduced to him walking up and down the same hallway since dressing a set costs money, along with the worst actor in the movie, and that's saying something. Your old pal Carl Eusebius was genuinely shocked to find that this woman--one Alex Meneses--had been acting for 15 years before this movie and had 47 credits on the IMdb. It must be some kind of achievement to do something professionally for that damn long and still be so fucking bad at it. She can barely recite Wynorski's ridiculous pseudoscientific gobbledygook in her remarkably robotic fashion. She only appears as a human being in scenes where she's being sexually harassed by Bubba or <i>very obviously</i> emoting that she still has a thing for old flame Sorbo, because if there are two attractive women in a Kevin Sorbo movie they <i>both</i> have to be his love interest, even if he never gives Meneses the time of day. I'm sure she pulls off the former because she doesn't have to act, per se; a woman who looks like Meneses undoubtedly has to fend off unwanted come-ons from cretinous lechers all the time. But my God, I hope that's not the same reason she pulls off the latter......<br />
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The fire kills a bunch of expendable meat in scenes we don't give a fuck about, including a hilarious attack on a boat in the middle of the lake that has the boat mostly, but in the end not quite, outrunning the fire. One woman in the boat, seeing the fire advancing menacingly on them, asks, "What's that?" <i>What's that?</i> It's <i>fire</i>, you silly bitch! I know the CGI in this movie is fucking awful, but Jesus, it's orange and crackling and <i>hot</i>. I'm glad they establish the fire is attracted to <i>moisture</i>, that way we get why it's going after the <i>people</i>. Who are currently on a <i>lake</i>. Then everyone in the town dies because of, uh, poison gas or something, so I'm glad we were introduced to a few of the townspeople in one scene. That way, the next scene in which they appear (you know, the one where they're all dead), we like care and stuff. Pathos, etc. Then the military shows up, and boy your old pal Carl Eusebius starts to get mad.<br />
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See, I really hate it when films and television get the military wrong. I don't know why that's one of my beefs, but it is. When they have military characters say and do things no one in the military would ever say or do, at least not without consequences. It takes me out of the film's world immediately. And it's usually <i>laaaaaaazzzzzzzyyyyyyyy</i>. It's not that hard to get this shit right, if you care. But if there's one thing Jim Wynorski doesn't care about, it's logic, coherence, pacing, tone, artistic integrity, consistency, drama, emotional resonance, avoidance of cliche, and attention to detail.<br />
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I have to go back to <i>Battlestar Galactica</i> again, because it fucking owns. That's getting the military right. One of my favorite scenes has Lee Adama, a member of <i>Galactica</i>'s crew, being told by a member of the <i>Pegasus</i> crew that <i>Galactica</i> must follow one of <i>Pegasus</i>'s policies. Lee responds that <i>Galactica</i> has its own commander and that that is who he takes his orders from. This is an excellent example of something called "chain of command", which the military takes very fucking seriously. It means that even though <i>Pegasus</i>'s commander is an admiral, and thus outranks <i>Galactica</i>'s commander, the <i>Pegasus</i> commander can't give orders directly to the crew of <i>Galactica</i>. What she <i>could</i> do is order <i>Galactica</i>'s commander to tell his crew to do what she wants, but she can't issue those orders directly to them, despite her superior rank. Having a high rank doesn't automatically give you authority over everyone you encounter. The military has spent a very long time figuring out why chain of command is a good idea, which is why pretty much every large organization has adopted it.<br />
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Incidentally, it's one thing that bugged the shit out of me on <i>Star Trek</i>. Despite the fact that the original show was made by veterans and portrayed an essentially military organization, it ignored military policies that would prevent some of the absurd situations the crew of the <i>Enterprise</i> found themselves in. An even better example is <i>The Next Generation</i> episode "Disaster", in which there are only 3 people on the bridge at the time the titular catastrophe shuts down all communication and nearly all movement on the ship. Those 3 people? The navigation officer, the psychotherapist, and a high ranking enlisted man. Much is made of the fact that, because of this emergency, the psychotherapist is now in command of the ship, despite her having absolutely no experience or training of any kind that is any way relevant, simply because her rank is higher than the navigation officer's. This is stupid, of course, because in any 20th century military, the navigator would be in charge, because she's what's known as a <i>line officer</i> (as in, <i>in line</i> to command) and so has (get this) <i>training in how to command</i>. It's almost as if the military considered, or has even experienced, such situations and <i>formulated specific policies to prevent such a ludicrous situation as the goddamned shrink being in charge of the ship</i>.<br />
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This movie? This movie has a general (that's a high rank, folks, meaning he's been in the Army a long time) walking around outside without his cover on. ("Cover" is military-speak for "hat".) It has a colonel meeting the general and not saluting him (no) or even greeting him at all (no no no) and immediately walking next to him to his right (no no no no no no no, inferiors walk on their superiors' <i>left</i>). It has an army major wearing a mustache (no, only the Air Force allows mustaches, and by tradition officers don't wear them anyway), and he looks like he's 70 years old, which puts him a good 20 years older than any major could still be in the Army. And he's supposed to be some kind of bigwig power player who gets calls from US senators. (Major is <i>way</i> too low a rank to be chatting up people in Congress.) At one point the general orders his man to "Call the Navy". <i>Call the Navy!</i> Yeah, just phone "the Navy" right up. The Navy, you know, that tiny office of the American government consisting of some <i>320,000</i> people. And the guy replies, "Done." Done? <i>Who the fuck are you gonna call?</i> This isn't the Ghostbusters office, son. The US Navy is just a <i>tad</i> bigger. You might want to narrow that down a bit.<br />
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God, I wished they'd filmed that scene: "Hello and thank you for calling the Navy. If you need the services of an aircraft carrier, please press 1. If your nuclear ballistic missile submarine is defective, press 2...." <br />
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Then the colonel introduces to world-renowned geologist <strike>Seagal</strike> Sorbo two majors...who are both wearing <i>lieutenant colonel's </i>insignia you dickheads, <i>you horrible dickheads!</i> And these <strike>lieutenant colonels</strike> majors keep calling Sorbo "Sir!" like they're just out of boot. Sorbo's all, "Just call me whatever the hell my name is in this movie" and they're all, "Yessir! I mean....whatever your name is." Haha, I get it, it's cute, army guys are dumb and can't stop calling people sir. Fuck you, Wynorski. Look, enlisted guys wouldn't do that anyway, because the people we trust to go to the desert and shoot brown people in the name of freedom <i>normally</i> have a few brain cells to rub together and so actually know who is to be addressed as "sir" and who isn't. But these guys are <i>officers</i>. That means they graduated from <i>college</i>. In fact they're <strike>lieutenant colonels</strike> majors, meaning most of the people they meet in their professional lives call <i>them</i> sir. And Sorbo <i>isn't even in the military</i>. Our fine Imperial stormtroopers are perfectly capable of applying military ways of doing things to military people and not applying those ways to people who aren't. Please stop portraying them as so dumb and single-minded that they can't tell the difference, Jim Wynorski, you fucking wanker.<br />
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So the colonel, Sorbo, Love Interest, Cranky White Dude, and Black Guy Who Will Die First find the source of the sentient fire. There's an explosion, killing Black Guy Who Dies First before he even gets any lines, while the palefaces run away. Blah blah stuff happens, then it's time to go back to the source of the fire and blow it up real gud. Yes, you defeat the fire by blowing it up with bombs, very scienmatifical. This is where the two <strike>lieutenant colonels</strike> majors show up, and so they and Sorbo head down into the caves to do what men do. Love Interest demands to accompany Sorbo to make sure he doesn't cock up the whole business, but he talks her down: "Honey, which one of us is the man, here? I do the hero stuff, you stand around looking concerned." Cranky White Dude dies entirely due to his own idiocy, but everyone else makes it out <i>just in time</i>, roll credits, I hate this movie.Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-72076054013128618252017-02-27T19:46:00.002-08:002017-02-27T19:46:42.047-08:00Game Over, ManRIP Private Hudson. You finally got out of this chickenshit outfit.Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-71944537890400272442016-11-21T17:09:00.001-08:002017-11-01T06:12:10.686-07:00The Crow: Wicked PrayerIn <i>The Crow: Wicked Prayer</i>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Furlong">John Connor</a> comes back from the dead as the world's lamest mime in an attempt to stop <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boreanaz">Angel</a> from having sex with Tara "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0369226/?ref_=nv_sr_1">New-FOUND-land</a>" Reid in order to become Satan, while Dennis Hopper speaks in offensive gangsta patois in his most embarrassing performance of the last five minutes.<br />
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Now the original <i>Crow</i> really wasn't that good. I'll pause for a moment while all the goths in the audience immediately cut themselves in rage. (That's why I don't mind insulting goths. They'll hurt themselves instead of me.) Okay, now calm down, turn down the Robert Smith record, and listen to your old pal Carl Eusebius while contemplating the meaninglessness of it all as you crawl in your skin or whatever. <i>The Crow</i> was carried past its weak script and threadbare characters by a charismatic lead. It's got great visuals, fine performances by genre veterans <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernie_Hudson">Winston Zeddemore</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Todd">Kurn</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Patrick_Kelly">Luther</a>, and an effective pop soundtrack for its time. It's about a gang of criminals that murder <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Lee">Bruce Lee's Son</a> and his girlfriend. Lee Jr. is so badass that he is resurrected a year later by the titular avian to bring the pain to those responsible. (Girlfriend, despite being raped and dying more slowly and painfully than Lee Jr., lacks the requisite penis necessary for being spectrally reanimated by a bird.) Not complicated or deep, but artistically shot and skillfully done, the film was anchored by an intense if not especially accomplished central performance. All in all, not a bad way to spend 100 minutes.<br />
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And Bai Ling doesn't even have to take her clothes off.<br />
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<i>The Crow: Wicked Prayer</i> is the third (yes, <i>third</i>) sequel to a film that died along with its star. Lacking any identity of its own, it alternately shamelessly apes the original film and totally undercuts it. Wisely, the filmmakers elected to steal the weakest elements of the original while jettisoning all the artistry and charisma that made it work. So the movie takes place in the American southwest instead of an unnamed Rust Belt city where it's constantly night and almost always raining. (Why yes, the original <i>Crow</i> <i>was</i> directed by Alex Proyas. How did you know?) That's right, a revenant dressed entirely in black and wearing white face-paint is wandering around the goddamn desert in the full light of day. Oh, and instead of Bruce Lee's Son, they got the charisma-free John Connor, who somehow became a worse actor as he grew up. I'm beginning to doubt that he's going to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Connor">save us from the machine overlords</a>.<br />
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This movie does <i>not</i> have fine performances. Instead, it has <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tara_Reid">Bunny Lebowski</a> showing everyone that she's just as terrible playing a brain-dead hillbilly slut as she was playing a brilliant archeologist, and also that she's not anywhere near as weirdly exotic and sexy as Bai Ling. When you make a clothed Bai Ling's acting look good by comparison, you need to re-think your career choice. It also has Angel doing the worst over-the-top Jack Nicholson impersonation <a href="http://mistermunshun.blogspot.com/2015/04/revisit-robin-hood-prince-of-thieves.html">this side of Christian Slater</a>. I guess the default setting for your typical bad actor who's getting no direction and playing a character with no backstory, motivation, or recognizably human emotion is to "do Jack", when what they really oughtta do is to <a href="http://mistermunshun.blogspot.com/2012/10/review-wicker-man.html">do</a> <a href="http://mistermunshun.blogspot.com/2012/11/review-drive-angry.html">Cage</a>.<br />
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The plot of <i>Wicked Prayer</i> is...well, it's the same as the plot of <i>The Crow</i>, really, only dumber and immensely moar confusing. We start with Angel breaking out of his prison chain gang. In his quest to become Satan (incidentally, the career my guidance counselor suggested for me in high school), Angel gets his old gang together: Bunny Lebowski, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Chong">Tank</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito_Ortiz">Washed-Up MMA Champion</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuji_Okumoto">That Guy I've Seen Somewhere</a>. Being the worst Satanists ever, they capture a Catholic priest and douse him with gasoline and then just leave, without telling him his mother sucks cocks in Hell or anything. They go to the podunk town that John Connor and his <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuelle_Chriqui">hot Quebecois girlfriend</a> are just about to leave on account of some Indian-white miner tension that never has any impact on the events to come. The gang gets one look at JC's godawful hairstyle and hangs both him and his French-Canadian squeeze, but not before Bunny cuts out the latter's (obviously fake plastic) eyeballs and sticks them into her own noggin. (Needless to say, the movie can't afford a shot of Bunny putting these clearly bogus orbs into her face, so you'll just have to trust the movie that this happens.) So now she can see the future, or the past, or something, and yes, Bunny Lebowski has the creepy witch/villain's girlfriend role that Bai Ling had in the original, though they drop the whole incest angle because, hey, that was bizarre and memorable and we'll have none of that in this movie, thank you very much. JC tries in vain to emote impotent rage and crushing sadness after Bunny stabs his <strike>Quebecois</strike> Indian girlfriend, and he's so bad at it that Angel kills him. <br />
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After Tank and W-UMMAC colossally fail at their simple task of "take the corpses into the desert and burn them", JC comes back to life, this time without waiting 3 days. After dragging his girlfriend's corpse back to her bed, he's horrified at his reflection (even though he was hanged so he doesn't even have a mark on his face) and tries to shoot himself, to find that he's now an indestructible zombie. So of course he paints his face in a terrible imitation of Bruce Lee's Son.<br />
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Now I know what you're thinking: Did he fire six shots, or only five? I mean, you're thinking, "Gee Carl Eusebius, you sexy beast you, this sure sounds an awful lot like a shitty rehash of the original." And you'd be right, of course. I am <i>damn </i>sexy. But now the movie introduces its original elements, which are even more terrible than its rip-offs. JC, you see, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation_characters#Alexander_Rozhenko">doesn't wanna be a warrior</a>. He hates his powers, doesn't seem to desire revenge, and spends much of the movie whining about being brought back to life. "I'm afraid of what I've become." Uh...why? We're 45 minutes into the film's expansive 99- minute running time, and you've done jack shit! What exactly have you become? At one point he even says, "I wanna die." What the <i>fuck </i>kind of undead avenger is this guy? I kept waiting for the Crow to take its power back. <i>Caw! God, what a pussy! Caw! Go back to the grave, shitnugget! Caw!</i><br />
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Finally, almost halfway through the film, JC confronts Guy I've Seen Somewhere, who understandably is less than intimidated by JC's bad make-up and petulant-teenager glare. When Bruce Lee's Son looked at his killers before he brought the pain, he was genuinely disturbing. The rage was seething and intense, but also cold and distant, as if the horrors that awaited these men were inevitable. John Connor looks like Mom just told him he can't go out on Friday night. I can't stress enough how terrible JC is in this movie. The film never really had a chance to work, but he absolutely <i>torpedoes</i> it with Costnerian finesse, alternately wildly overacting and grumbling out his lines like he's annoyed with the director for pointing the camera at him. He doesn't project anywhere near the emotion, charisma, and badassery necessary to pull off a man so hungry for vengeance that even death itself can't stop him. And he's done no favors by being a foot shorter and proportionally smaller than <i>all</i> of his enemies, especially Angel, which the director doesn't even attempt to hide. If you're going to be a short guy kicking everybody's ass on film, you either have to be the scrappy underdog who wins through guile rather than brute force, or Joe Pesci. Because otherwise, it looks ridiculous onscreen.<br />
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The movie then rushes to get through the rest of its "plot". JC <i>somewhat implausibly</i> defeats W-UMMAC in a martial arts fight after W-UMMAC starts bashing up a party with a baseball bat (along with the film's continuity, as the mask he's wearing alternately appears and disappears between shots). Bunny somehow knows the Crow is JC's weakness, despite none of the villains even knowing he was back from the grave until this scene, so they kill the Crow, making our whiny hero even more pathetic and ineffective and so Angel kicks his ass. Then they just leave again, because if they kill him while he's powerless, then the bad guys would win and the movie would be over. They reach the main Satanic temple run by Dennis Hopper, who marries the unholy couple and then gets stabbed by Bunny for reasons that are explained in a flashback that absolutely no one on Earth cares about at this point. Angel becomes Satan, but he has to boink Bunny to make it permanent, because otherwise the bad guys would win and the movie would be over. JC shows up, but he still sucks so Angel kicks his ass again, while a bunch of JC's Indian friends kill Tank in a scene so filled with boredom you'll glance over at the screen and sigh wearily. For his part, Angel, instead of taking Bunny right then and there in the Satanic temple and making himself permanently Satan--I mean, it's a <i>Satanic temple</i>, isn't it?--decides he and Bunny have to drive somewhere else entirely in order to do the deed. Because if they just did it right now the bad guys would--well, you get the
picture.<br />
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JC, despite being crucified by SatAngel (he's playing "Jimmy Cuervo" in this movie, so the ham-handed Christ allegory is the movie's, not mine) is Only Resting, so he jumps in <i>his</i> stolen car and gives pursuit. (Things a reanimated spirit should never do: drive a car.) He catches up to Angel and gets his ass kicked <i>yet again</i>, because he's powerless without the Crow and Angel is Satan. (Ignore the fact that JC got pretty thrashed by W-UMMAC when he still had the Crow's power, at least until the script said it was time for him to win.) Then Danny Trejo joins the illustrious ranks of <a href="http://mistermunshun.blogspot.com/2012/08/bark-at-moon.html">Hispanic Guys Playing American Indians Because Who'll Know the Difference, Right?</a> when he leads an embarrassing "Indian" dance to bring the Crow back to life, even though the movie earlier claimed that the Crow's power comes from the Christian God. Okay, the original film's mythology was pretty vague, but it was pretty clearly <i>not </i>Judeo-Christian. We're a long way from the original's "Stop me if you've heard this one: Jesus Christ walks into a hotel. He hands the innkeeper three nails and asks, 'Can you put me up for the night?'" Okay, movie, just go back to aping the first film. Yes, you suck at that, too, but it's far better than your attempts at being original.<br />
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Blah blah, the Crow's back, JC starts no-selling Angel's attacks and kills him, and the Sun comes up, which I guess makes Bunny blind since now her plastic eyeballs don't work anymore(?). The End.<br />
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<i>The Crow: Wicked Prayer</i> is a shitty cash-in on the tragic death of a break-out movie star that showcases the worst of everyone involved in making it, including people that we know are capable of better and Tara Reid. Fuck this movie with seventeen crow beaks.Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-63862230029496763732016-10-21T20:12:00.000-07:002016-11-20T23:47:42.354-08:00Cabin Fever: Patient Zero<i>Cabin Fever: Patient Zero</i> didn't suck seven different kinds of ass. I'd call it maybe a four-ass sucker.<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Now I know what you're thinking: This one has forgotten whether its heat-sink is over capacity. You're also thinking, "But Carl Eusebius, a direct-to-video* prequel to an Eli Roth gorefest has to suck at least 6.3 different kinds of ass, according to my highly advanced scienmatifical calculations." But really, the worst part of this movie is that it <span style="font-family: inherit;">keeps getting in the way of itself. Any time it starts to build any sort of tension or interest, it goes out of its way to shoot itself down like the Soviet air force on a jetliner full of innocent civilians. <span lang="EN-US" style="line-height: 107%;">Well, and it shamelessly objectifies and abuses
women, but I already said "Eli Roth". The thing is, yer old pal Carl Eusebius has seen <i>far</i> worse than this, even in the <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1194271/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">"stupid people aimlessly wandering around darkened rooms and occasionally shooting zombies"</a> subgenre. I actually paid attention for the whole of this film's expansive 94-minute running time. At this level of filmmaking, that puts this movie <span style="font-family: inherit;">in a higher category <span style="font-family: inherit;">of suck</span></span>. But I still hate it, because<span style="font-family: inherit;"> with j<span style="font-family: inherit;">ust a <i>little</i> more effort, the movie could have <span style="font-family: inherit;">ascended the quality <span style="font-family: inherit;">mountain </span>to rea<span style="font-family: inherit;">ch the peak of "kind of okay"<span style="font-family: inherit;">, but the fil<span style="font-family: inherit;">mmakers just couldn't be b<span style="font-family: inherit;">ot<span style="font-family: inherit;">hered<span style="font-family: inherit;"> to strive for such a Herculean acco<span style="font-family: inherit;">mplishment.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US" style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Oh, and </span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US" style="line-height: 107%;">the object<span style="font-family: inherit;">ifying and <span style="font-family: inherit;">abusing </span>women thing.</span></span></span></span><br />
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A shaggy-bearded <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000276/?ref_=tt_cl_t1">No, Mr. Frodo!</a> stars as the titular patient zero of the titular cabin fever, a disease that causes you to sprout unconvincing rash make-up and projectile vomit blood, but only if there's somebody close enough for you to spew infected puke all over. No, Mr. Frodo!, who I guess left his acting in his other beard, is being held in a secret cell on a tiny uninhabited island somewhere near the Dominican Republic because the cast and crew wanted a vacation in paradise while they shot their shitty wannabe-exploitation flick. Unfortunately for the people in the original <i>Cabin Fever</i>--that blistering sore on the collective ass of humanity--the scientists studying patient zero (that's scientist-speak for the first documented case of a disease, though in this movie he's inexplicably immune) are the dumbest motherfuckers on the face of our Earth and are totally incapable of preventing an outbreak, let alone actually creating a cure. They have a patient infected with a certain-death, uncurable blood-born pathogen, and not only do they allow him easy access to sharp instruments (he only has to yank a bit at the metal grating that is, of course, on the <i>inside</i> of his cell window rather than the outside), but they give him <i>privacy in his cell so they can't even see him doing this</i>. Good God, if you're going to be dumb enough to give him privacy (there's a reason cells in real prisons lack curtains, y'all), at least don't allow it <i>where the easy-to-remove-and-slice-yourself-open-with metal grating is</i>.<br />
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But they do, so the next time the moonsuited scientists come into his cell, No, Mr. Frodo! reaches under the hood of Guy Who Isn't the Main Evil Scientist and gives him a good NHL facewash (the guy's hood isn't even <i>velcroed</i> down or anything), and this causes a lockdown that quarantines the immediate environs of the cell. No, not the whole facility, just the 3 people who <strike>have speaking roles</strike> were in the area of the cell at the time. Everybody else gets to leave. This is despite the fact that Main Evil Scientist (who's <i>really </i>trying to be Kevin Spacey and sucking hard at it) earlier specifically said it wasn't an airborne pathogen. So why are Hot Blonde Assistant and Mangled English Scientist Lady Who Constantly Reminds Everyone That Patient Zero Is Still a <i>Human Being</i> being quarantined? They weren't even in the cell! Only Guy Who Isn't Main Evil Scientist snorted infected hobbit blood. How the hell is that a "containment breach" that the loudspeaker is bleating about? Nothing's been breached, and they <i>have </i>containment. <i>No, Mr. Frodo! is still in the cell, and so is the one guy he infected</i>. This ain't Captain Trips, here.<br />
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Fuck this movie.<br />
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Now we get to the significantly less interesting (no, really) part of the movie. As I said, every time this movie does something right or builds any kind of tension or interest at all, it invariably ruins it <i>immediately</i>, usually by cutting away from the interesting part to our merry band of thirtysomethings. (Actually the IMdb says two of the four are under 30, but they sure don't look it.) They're such stock stereotypes that I'm not going to bother giving you their names. Lord knows I never paid attention to whatever their names were. Let's see, we've got Nerd, his brother Jock (who seems to have gotten all the washboard abs in the family), and their best friend Stoner, along with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0615050/mediaviewer/rm3129207296">Liara T'Soni</a> as the woman the filmmakers paid enough to appear topless for about 2.5 seconds. I mean, it's so perfunctory you wonder why they even bothered. She's Jock's girlfriend (in the sole believable moment of this tripe, because a woman who looks like Liara isn't going to be with Nerd or Stoner), and she comes along on Nerd's bachelor party, which consists entirely of our foursome alone on the blood-puking plague island. I'm having flashbacks to <i>House of the Dead</i> here, and that ain't a good thing, since <i>House of the Dead</i> sucks donkey balls and Uwe Boll is a crime against humanity. After Nerd gets mad at Stoner and Jock for talking shit about his fiance (um, it's a bachelor party, you dumb asshole, that's what they're <i>supposed</i> to do), Liara follows him back to his cabin in the little ferry they're taking to Blood-Puke Isle and doffs her top right in front of him(!) because they apparently had a fling some summer back. So forget what I said about believable. I know Jock's a complete asshole and a lunkhead (and somehow Nerd's brother, even though they look about as alike as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rob Schneider), but, well, Nerd is kind of an asshole too (must run in the family), and he's got the build of a meth addict and Bon Jovi's hair. I refuse to believe Liara ever embraced eternity with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2825507/mediaviewer/rm231178752">the lovechild of Benedict Cumberbatch and Andy Dick</a>. And now she's topless and coming on to him when her boyfriend/his brother is <i>right outside the flimsy door to this tiny ferry cabin</i>. Such is the raw animal magnetism of Nerd. He rather wisely leaves (probably the <i>only</i> sensible decision any of the characters makes), and that's it, folks. That's the first of the three functions the filmmakers have for Liara in their film. And believe me, showing a flash of nipples to Napoleon Dynamite over here is the <i>classiest</i> of the three.<br />
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I hate this movie.<br />
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Stoner and Nerd go off to smoke marijuana while Jock and Liara snorkel for a bit. The latter two run across the corpses of like 30 fish, causing Liara to freak out and head for the tent. Stoner and Nerd wonder what her problem is, to which Jock responds, "Liara thinks she saw something." <i>Thinks she saw something</i>? You swam past 30 dead fish, you dumb motherfucker! She wasn't alone, you were <i>there</i>! This wasn't a glimpse of a shape in the darkness. You're snorkeling in the Caribbean! The water was clear as day, and there were dozens of dead fish! You couldn't possibly have failed to see them. God, what an asshole. Jock also notices a rash on Liara's arm, which he thinks is sunburn(??). Uh, genius, sunburn on one part of one arm, and nowhere else? Even Jock realizes how stupid he sounds, so he next suggests an averse reaction to salt water(???). Um, Jock? Just stop with the suggestions, alright? She gets sick quickly, complaining of feeling hot, and the "sunburn" rapidly turns into bad make-up effects on her neck and arms. She has another freak-out, but Jock assures her some calamine lotion will fix her right up. As he goes to get it, she notices he has a rash, too, but Jock's still blas<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">é</span> ab</span>out the whole thing. I'd be a <i>bit </i>more worried that you both turned up with the same rash at the same time after snorkeling with a bunch of fish corpses, ya mook. We then get the second reason Liara is here. It turns out that being infected with a blood-puking plague puts her in the mood, and Jock goes down on her right there in the tent. She lets out a blood-curdling scream that all three men mistake for orgasmic bliss, making it immediately clear that none of them has ever heard a woman orgasm outside of porn before. Proud of his work, Jock looks up so the camera can see his face and chest are covered in blood (I'm <i>beginning </i>to think the filmmakers have issues with women here)--uh, he didn't <i>notice</i> that??--and then she <i>projectile vomits blood into his face</i>. Um, okay, he's already ingested plenty of her blood through his earlier, uh, activity. Plus, <i>she saw the same rash on the back of his leg, so he was already infected</i>. See, this is what I mean about the film screwing up any hope of being any fucking good. In any decent movie, it would be the oral sex that infected him. But no, they have to pile it on by having her puke on him, and oh yeah, he was already infected just by swimming in the water with her, so none of this even matters. He was dead 10 minutes before this scene even started. Did anyone take even a moment to think about this stupid movie before they rolled camera? They're taking "gratuitous gore" to a whole new level, here.<br />
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Jock stumbles out of the tent, covered in blood, and deadpans. "I think Liara's sick." Gee, <i>you think</i>? The movie's so scattershot it's hard to tell what's intentionally funny and what's just hilariously bad writing, but <i>I think</i> that's one of three genuinely funny lines in the movie. It's suddenly almost night, and only then, hours after Liara's bloody puking episode, does Nerd decide to wander aimlessly around the island looking for help. Liara and Jock are getting sicker by the minute, though Liara is much worse off, I guess because she's a girl? I don't think infectious diseases work slower on lunkheaded oafs, so why does she get sick faster? Jock goes outside to disinfect his terrible make-up job but only succeeds in hurting himself. Liara comes out of the tent because she's having difficulty breathing, leading to Jock's immortal line, "Get back in the <i>motherfuckin' tent!</i>" I believe--one can never be too sure with this movie--that this is the second intentionally funny line. In the meantime, Main Evil Scientist is determined to continue experimenting on No, Mr. Frodo! even during the 48-hour quarantine, but they only have one moonsuit locked in with them, for the simple reason that if they had more suits the following scene couldn't happen. It turns out that Guy Who Isn't Main Evil Scientist is getting sick a lot faster than earlier cases, meaning there must be a new strain of the disease. Main Evil Scientist asks Hot Blond Assistant if she trusts him, to which she responds, "With my life"(??). So I'm guessing he didn't get her from a temp agency, then. He puts on the moonsuit and injects Guy Who Isn't Him with a potential cure, without strapping the guy down or anything, and HBA doesn't even put on a surgical mask. Guy starts having an episode, screaming and thrashing around, so MES demands that HBA help hold him down. She begs off, since, you know, she doesn't have a suit and the guy might puke blood all over her and infect her with the New and Improved Blood-Puking Plague, but he calls her out about her trust issues, so she comes over and helps. Suddenly, just when we most expect it, Guy pukes blood all over her. I mean, he fucking aims at her. MES is closer and moonsuited, so Guy could've puked on him, but Guy must have a grudge against HBA because he absolutely nails her, with nary a drop hitting MES. There's then a genuinely effective scene as HBA seals MES in the room with Guy (he looks at her like this is some big betrayal, but, um, you're still in the suit, and oh yeah you just got her death-puked, blockhead) and runs horrified to the chemical shower, stripping off her clothes (but on her salary, only down to her bra and panties) and trying in vain to wash the blood off, even though we know and she knows that it's too late and she's doomed to become a blood-puking zombie.<br />
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So we <i>immediately</i> cut away to Nerd wandering in the jungle at night bickering with Stoner over Nerd's fling with Liara that one summer. <i>Yes</i>! Because when your two best friends are dying horribly, Stoner, <i>that's</i> the time to start shit with your third best friend over petty drama from years ago!<br />
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See what I mean about the movie sabotaging itself? It doesn't know what it wants to be. Sometimes it's an almost kind of okay outbreak movie, then it's a terrible stoner comedy, then it's a (not at all) sex(y) romp, then it's a zombie movie. Each part of the movie is almost entirely self-contained and keeps getting in the way of the others. It's a Frankenstein's monster of a movie, only Frank never got around to actually sewing the parts together.<br />
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Let's speed this up. Since Liara is dying back in the <i>motherfuckin'</i> <i>tent</i>, Stoner has to play the "girl" part in the final, <i>28 Days Later </i>rip-off part of the film (i.e., he has to be panicky and generally useless and as a result cause the very situation from which the hero has to rescue him). He and Nerd break into the research facility. They see some blood, leading to the movie's third and last intentionally funny line ("Don't touch it!" "Why the fuck would I touch it?"). Stoner immediately panics and gets them trapped inside. Meanwhile, Jock hears from Main Evil Scientist on his radio that he can help with the cure if Jock comes to the facility, so Jock tries to help Liara to her feet but instead tears all the skin off her arms. I hate it when that happens. He flees alone to the facility and meets up with the others, and they find that all the scientists outside the quarantine zone are blood-puking zombies who want to murder them, because that's just what zombies do. (So, the 3 people closest to No, Mr. Frodo! and quarantined with him <i>weren't</i> infected, and everyone farther away and not quarantined <i>was</i>?**) One of them tries to shoot Stoner, but when he fires his gun, <i>it blows off his hand and sends it rocketing into his own head, killing him</i>. My God, I laughed for a solid minute at that one. I think it's supposed to be funny, but it's still so dumb that I was laughing at the movie rather than with it. The zombie's gun turns his own hand into a deadly projectile, <i>to himself</i>. And where did the bullet go? Anyway, they fight their way through the zombified staff and reach the quarantined area, where Hot Blond Assistant tries to trick them into telling her where their boat is. They're dumb enough to start to tell her, even though her clothes are bloody and she's talking to them through a surgical mask, but then Mangled English Lady Scientist appears and shouts at her to "show them your skin". No, she's not trying to get HBA naked. She just wants her to take off the mask. HBA hems and haws about taking off her mask, and really, what's the point here? Even these two dumbasses have the brainpower to figure out something ain't right since she's being so squirrelly about taking her mask off. But the movie needs a stupid "scare" reveal, so she finally does it and we see that she is now <i>Return of the Living Dead </i>Rip-Off Zombie. Seriously, the make-up fucking <i>blows</i>. The guys act all shocked, but uh, didn't you just fight like a dozen plague zombies? What's so shocking about this one?<br />
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Anyway, Rip-Off Zombie escapes and makes for the raft. Just as she reaches it, Liara emerges from the tent, looking less human than she did when she was blue and had scalp crests, ready for her third function in the movie, the <i>*sigh*</i> inevitable cat fight. Since deception went so well for Rip-Off Zombie last time, she tries to bluff her way past Liara, but Liara got her doctorate before she was even 100 years old, so no dice. Rip-Off Zombie then doffs her surgical mask in the traditional "show my scary-ass face" ritual of challenge to estrogen-fueled combat, and the fight to the death between two characters who are both about to die from a horrible flesh-eating virus begins! Liara seems to be getting the better of it, despite not having any skin on her arms and never once hitting Rip-Off with a Singularity, but then Rip-Off hulks up, calls Liara a pureblood bitch, and starts whaling on her, pushing her inside the tent and choking her, even though Rip-Off got puked on by Guy Who Isn't Main Evil Scientist, whose version of the plague the movie earlier said was way more fast-acting, so I don't get why she isn't a hell of a lot weaker than Liara. In fact, given how fast GWIMES died and how much time has passed, I don't know why Rip-Off isn't dead already. But then the movie once again almost, <i>almost</i> redeems itself, as Liara reaches desperately for the <i>giant black dildo that Stoner and Jock gave Nerd as his bachelor party present</i>. I went from shouting, "Goddamn it Liara, put the skinny bitch in Stasis!" to "Yes! Yes, <i>beat her to death with a massive ebony phallus! Do it!</i>" But she doesn't do it. Well, she does, but again, the movie torpedoes itself with Trumpian skill. Instead of the classic "Grab the giant black dong and smack the zombie bitch in the face with it before she chokes you to death or you die of blood-puke syndrome" (man, if I had a dollar for every time I've seen <i>that</i> old gambit), she just gives up reaching for the dildo and instead grabs Rip-Off's elbows and <i>breaks her</i> <i>forearms in half</i>. Okay, how did Liara know she could <i>do </i>that? And how can Rip-Off exert enough force to choke a bitch when her bones are so brittle they break in half when Liara squeezes them? I don't think this movie understands how muscles work. Then Liara gets on top of her and grabs the dildo and beats her to death with it and no, movie, I'm sorry, the moment has passed. You had it, and you blew it. You had me hot and bothered and ready to go down on you, and then your phone rang and you fucking stopped to answer it, leaving me to just put my clothes back on and leave. Nope, too late, you have to beat a zombie bitch to death with a huge rubber phallus as soon as you get the chance. No trying to go back to it later.<br />
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Then of course Liara <i>immediately </i>dies. Goddamn this movie.<br />
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Blah blah, only No, Mr. Frodo!, Nerd, and Mangled English survive and get back to the ferry. Why yes, there <i>is</i> a slow-motion shot of them walking away from the facility as it explodes, thank you for asking! But the movie keeps going, so you know some kind of stupid fuck-you-to-the-audience twist is coming. Sure enough, No, Mr. Frodo! brings Nerd and Mangled English two bottles of water, which they immediately start swigging from. Now I know blood-born pathogens aren't easily transmitted, and people who suffer from them already face a stigma because of people's fear of disease and abject ignorance of even the most basic science, but really, given what these two have been through, I think it's reasonable for them to refuse to chug down something handed to them by Mr. I Started the Whole Blood-Puking Death Plague. But they gulp it down without a second thought just so Mangled English can intuit No, Mr. Frodo!'s betrayal, and we now see the water is tinted red, which it clearly wasn't in the earlier shots. Oh, and No, Mr. Frodo! just pistol-murders the ferry pilot instead of infecting him too because, um....The film leaves Nerd's state ambiguous, pointedly not revealing whether he has a rash or not. But my money's on he's dead, since he doesn't appear in <i>Cabin Fever</i> and oh yeah the disease kills everyone except hobbits. And no, there's absolutely no indication at any point in the film of why No, Mr. Frodo! murders everybody in the end. He was angry because he was locked up by the scientists and his wife and son are dead, yes, but Nerd wasn't even involved in any of that except to break him <i>out</i> of the facility, and Mangled English was the only one in the facility who gave a damn about him and tried to help him. No Mr. Frodo! specifically told her that her "compassion makes [her] different from the others". Not different enough for him not to murder her, I guess.<br />
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And you know what? There's not a single cabin anywhere in this movie.<br />
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<i>Cabin Fever: Patient Zero,</i> get back in the <i>motherfuckin' tent</i>!<br />
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* Yeah, it got limited release in theaters, but "limited release" for a flick like this is code for "dump it somewhere cheap and dirty so we can technically say it wasn't direct-to-video". Sorry, hack filmmakers, but Carl Eusebius is not bound by The Man's technicalities. This movie doesn't deserve to be screened alongside such worthies as <i>Transformers: Oh God Another One</i> and <i>Rise of the Dawn of the Day of the Conquest of the Planet of the Apes</i>.<br />
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** Hot Blond Assistant infected a lab mouse with the virus as part of the experiments (I guess?) but then <i>dropped it on the floor</i>, so it escaped quarantine and infected the people outside. (Yes, she was holding the thing in her hand, and while it was awake, yet.) And she doesn't even tell anybody about it! Whoops, death-mouse got away, <i>oh well</i>. That's how Mangled English figures out the big twist. When Nerd tells her that the people outside traced their infection to a mouse, she remembers that No, Mr. Frodo! sang "Three Blind Mice" at her one time when he was raving about being experimented on. But, but...No, Mr. Frodo! had nothing to do with the mouse escaping! He couldn't even have <i>seen</i> it happen, since <i>it was him being shocked by cattle prods that startled HBA into dropping the mouse in the first place</i>. And Mangled English <i>knows </i>that, because she was standing right next to her. Stupid movie.Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-7224260258310377412016-08-24T01:06:00.001-07:002016-08-28T02:04:06.418-07:00Captain America: Civil War<i>Captain America: Random Subtitle</i> is the story of how superheroes are great to have around unless you make the fatal mistake of attempting to bring one of their friends to justice.<br />
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Now let me start by saying I'm not exactly a fan of Marvel, or of comic books in general. My teenage boy phase of comic collecting ended around age 15 and I haven't given two shits about comic books since then. After that, I watched the occasional comic book film, and they were kind of decent. I liked the first <i>X-Men</i> film alright (from waaay back in 2000), and I watched <i>Iron Man</i> on the airplane and found it to be a movie. But basically, once I saw <i>Spider-Man II</i> and <i>The Dark Knight</i> (the latter about 3 years after it came out), I was just kind of done with superhero films. So I haven't seen <i>The Avengers</i> or the other <i>Captain America: Random Subtitle</i> movies or any of those Hulk things or any of the X-Men or Wolverine movies that came after <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men:_The_Last_Stand"><i>X-Men: The One Where Everybody Dies</i></a>. I've seen both of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Four_(2005_film)">Fantastic</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Four:_Rise_of_the_Silver_Surfer">Four</a> movies that have the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Alba">CGI character playing the Invisible Woman</a> and both of the hysterically silly Ghost Rider movies, and the bottomlessly shitty <i>Daredevil</i> and its even more shitty spin-off? sequel? funeral march? <i>Elecktra</i>, but those I sought out <i>because </i>they're crap. The other Marvel movies, to judge by <i>Iron Man: The Iron Man</i>, seem to be a generic, bland paste that don't really stand out enough to be either good or bad. They're just there.<br />
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I mean, for action sequences and super-powered beings punching each other,<i> Spider-Man II </i>seemed to be the best there ever was or will be. And <i>The Dark Knight</i> is the best comic book film in every respect but that of action sequences and super-powered beings punching each other. So I didn't see much point in watching any more such movies. What were they going to do that hadn't already been done better by those two films?<br />
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To judge by <i>Captain America: Whatever</i>, the answer is <i>absolutely fucking nothing</i>.<br />
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This movie was pretty bad, in ways I wasn't expecting. I thought it would just be another <i>Iron Man: The Iron Man</i> that I could put on to help me sleep on the plane while Iron Man punched Captain America and Captain America punched Iron Man and Scarlett Johansson struggled to speak in a remotely human fashion. Instead, I was confronted by a morally reprehensible mess, in which Captain America (and the movie is positively <i>loath</i> to address him as such) critically injures numerous police officers, betrays all his friends, and causes the deaths of dozens of people solely to keep his terrorist murderer friend from being arrested by the proper authorities. (To be completely fair, Cap and Iron Man <i>do </i>punch each other, and Scarlett Johansson remains as robotic and unnaturally stiff as ever.)<br />
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Now I never liked Captain America. I didn't dislike him, either. I just didn't care about him one way or the other, because he's basically Marvel's version of Superman. Not in the powers department (Supes is essentially Christ himself descended, while Cap is more the pushing of human physiology to its absolute limit), but in the morality/leadership department. If Superman is the Last Boy Scout of Krypton, Cap is George Washington with Arnold Schwarzenegger's physique. When I was in my comics phase, I was much more interested in the antihero asskickers who gave the bad guys what they deserved and did it with a whole lot of attitude, guys like Wolverine and the Ghost Rider. (Okay, Ghostie didn't really have attitude, but he had <i>a flaming skull for a head</i>. That's like 1000 cool points right there.) I didn't have any patience for namby-pamby do-gooders like Cap and Supes who tried to bring their enemies in <i>alive</i> instead of bringing the rain to wash the scum from the streets.<br />
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Now of course, I'm a bit older and so would probably be moar interested in the moral dilemmas of the goody-two-shoes types, if I wasn't also old enough to not give a shit about comic books any more. But what I don't understand is why people who <i>are</i> fans of Captain America aren't pitching a fit over this lousy movie. I don't know that much about Cap's character, but what little I do know is <i>completely pissed on</i> by the makers of <i>Captain America: Does It Matter, Really?</i>. And Jesus, how bad do you have to fuck up to be the <i>worse </i>half of a double-header in which the other film is <i>Batman v. Superman</i>? That's right, people I've never heard of who made <i>Captain America</i>, I watched your film back-to-back with a fucking Hack Snyder film, and you <i>lost</i>. When your story is less interesting than that of the man who gave us <i>300</i>, you need to hang up your movie cameras and go home. I can't fucking believe I watched the two biggest superhero movies of this year and the only thing I enjoyed <i>at all</i> was Ben Affleck in a batsuit. If you spent a million jillion dollars on a movie and Ben "<i>Gigli</i>" Affleck was the best thing about it, <i>stop making movies!</i><br />
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The plot, I guess. The Avengers are split in two over a proposal to actually subject them to oversight. That is, the United Nations wants to have power over the Avengers' going somewhere to deal with a problem, as opposed to their current M.O. of brazenly violating the sovereignty of any nation they please in order to handle whichever situations they see fit, without asking anybody's permission or having any kind of accountability. This is primarily because the Avengers have, according to this movie, a pretty bad track record of getting innocent bystanders killed when they perform their feats of heroic derring-do. Let me say again, <i>the movie</i> <i>says</i> the Avengers' actions have gotten an untold number of civilians killed. (Though as Cap explains to some girl who's so powerful she seems to eliminate the need to even have the rest of the team, she isn't responsible for all those people's deaths because, you know, the bad guys started it. Yes, it's <a href="http://mistermunshun.blogspot.com/2013/07/review-amazing-spider-man.html">the felony-murder doctrine</a>, applied to people who can level entire cities with a thought.)<br />
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So the Avengers split, with Iron Man leading the "we gotta stop being vigilantes" side and Cap leading the "fuck the normies, we handle shit our own way" side. Wait, what? Yes, you read that right: Captain America, the conscious of the Marvel Universe, says screw the United Nations and people who don't have superpowers. We don't answer to them. We go where we want when we want, because the UN might, like, investigate a problem to see if it warrants sending in a super-powered Scarlett Johansson, and we'll have none of <i>that</i>, mister. I just want to make sure it's clear that <i>Captain fucking America</i> is taking the position that super-powered beings--or at least the ones on his team--should remain laws unto themselves, answerable and accountable to no one. That's right, Captain America, who in his last movie was in S.H.I.E.L.D., an organization of superheroes...answerable to the United Nations. This leads to an incredibly boring and silly fight as the Avengers fight each other in truly the saddest "Who would win in a fight between Superman and the Hulk?" that little boys have argued about since time immemorial. ("No way, Xenophane! Apollo would <i>totally </i>kick Hermes's <i>ass</i> if they wrestled!") It's embarrassing to the human race that the biggest movie of 2016 has all the dramatic tension of two 9 year olds arguing on the playground.<br />
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I remember being confused when I first heard about the titular "civil war". Surely, I thought, I'd misheard. <i>Cap</i> should be calling for an agreement to work with the governments of the world and not running around the world as uncontrollable vigilantes, and Tony Stark should be telling the world to kiss his ass, determined to do things his way. Am I the voice crying in the wilderness, here? But upon seeing the film, it's even worse than that, since Cap doesn't even stand against the agreement on principle. No, he opposes it mostly because those governments are trying to arrest his buddy Bucky, since they (and Cap) have very good reason to think the Buckster planted a bomb at a UN meeting that killed like 60 people.<br />
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I'd like to mention that again: Cap also has good reason to think Bucky committed this terrorist act, as he sees the evidence himself. In fact, <i>at no point does Cap suggest Bucky is not guilty of this crime</i>. (Of course he isn't guilty, because that might have been interesting, but for most of the film Cap doesn't know that.) He simply assaults dozens of police officers, causes a fight that paralyzes Don Cheadle from the waist down (the Black Guy Always Gets Crippled First), and breaks his fellow rebelling Avengers out of prison (where, need I even say, they <i>absolutely belong</i> as they have <i>knowingly and willfully and repeatedly violated the law</i>). And the movie ends, by God, the movie ends with Tony Stark <i>admitting Cap is right and grovelling in front of him</i>. Yes, the man who made the difficult yet absolutely morally correct decision is forced to kowtow to the very asshole who betrayed his comrades and willfully became a criminal so he could protect Timothy fucking McVeigh. And we're expected to cheer this moment! God, I want to punch this movie.<br />
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In the last 4 minutes, I just sketched out in my head the outline for what might have been a decent Captain America film with the same general plot. Of course this time, Cap will be on the <i>right</i> side, that of law and order and oversight and not being a fucking answers-to-nobody mete-out-God's-own-justice vigilante. Being presented with evidence of Bucky's guilt, Cap reluctantly does the right thing and agrees to work with law enforcement to bring him in, while Tony Stark castigates him for selling out his friend to the normies and vowing that the Avengers will handle the situation in-house, apprehending Bucky themselves and handing him over to the authorities only if <i>they</i> determine him guilty. The film would have Cap slowly realizing that some of the people's he's working with are less than committed to bringing Bucky in alive and actually giving him a fair trial and are more interested in Osama bin Laden-ing him in revenge for the terrorist attack. At the same time, Stark is dropping hints that Bucky is being framed, testing Cap's resolve for sticking with doing things the right way. The writers could take it from there. We'd still get our fanservice "Avengers fight each other" scene, but at least this time it might have some weight since it has Cap doing the right thing for the right reasons (putting aside personal feelings to follow the rule of law) and Stark doing the wrong thing but still for the right reasons (trying to save a possibly innocent man from a system that isn't giving him a fair shake). We might even get some <i>*gaspshockhorror* </i>tension. Can Cap bring Bucky in alive while still working with the corrupt law enforcement that's trying to take him out?<br />
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Not only would this scenario be more in keeping with each character's established, er, character (and let me stress again that I've never cared one whit about either Iron Man or Captain America, but I <i>hate</i> it when characters act completely <i>out</i> of character), but it would be a Captain America film that centers on, oh I don't know, fucking <i>Captain America</i> instead of being a half-assed <i>Avengers 3</i>.<br />
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<i>Captain America: Avengers 2 1/2</i> is a morally repugnant character assassination of a character I never gave a shit about anyway. The people who made this movie need to get their fuckin' heads checked after getting their asses handed to them by Ben Affleck and Hack Snyder in the storytelling and character departments, something I didn't think was <i>possible</i> under the physical laws governing this universe.<br />
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Oh well. At least the, what, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Holland_(actor)">3rd incarnation of Spider-Man in the last 9 years</a> was pretty nifty. I'm glad <i>somebody</i> was behaving in character around here. Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-13536512576390632632016-07-19T09:17:00.000-07:002016-07-20T08:45:40.767-07:00Revisit: Independence DayNow that Hollywood has proven beyond any doubt that the American film industry is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformers:_The_Last_Knight">totally</a> out of ideas and the studio bean counters will only greenlight <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostbusters_(2016_film)">something</a> that has <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jem_and_the_Holograms_(film)">some sort</a> of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Break_(2015_film)">name</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man:_Homecoming">recognition</a> by not only making, but actually releasing and publicly promoting a sequel to <i>Independence Day</i>, I feel the time is right to revisit the original artistically bankrupt naked cash-grab.<br />
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<i>Independence Day</i> is the story of Cousin Eddie saving the human race just to make President Lone Starr proud, while Cypher Raige and Jeff Goldblum destroy an entire alien species with their unstoppable quipping powers.<br />
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Written and directed by the Mad German himself, Roland "<i>2012</i>" Emmerich, <i>Independence Day </i>wipes out most of the human race in "put-this-in-the-trailer" money shots of (entirely American) landmarks being blown up real good and then treads water for an hour before Steve Jobs's technological brilliance wipes out our alien oppressors. I know people regard Uwe Boll as the worst thing to ever come out of Germany, and they're right, of course. But Emmerich's in the top 5, ranking just below Hitler and just above Angela Merkel.<br />
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Ah, 1996. Cast yourselves back to a more innocent time, when movies consisting of nothing more than offensive ethnic stereotype and explosions edited together with shots of people shouting at display screens could be made by people who weren't Michael Bay. Yes, in the mid '90s, guys in suits who really should've known better would routinely hand tens of millions of dollars to a goofy German who got his start in America directing a shitty action film starring <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Van_Damme">Guile</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolph_Lundgren">Ivan Drago</a>. Your old pal Carl Eusebius actually liked <i>Independence Day</i> when he first saw it in the theater, though I suspect that had as much to do with the fact that I saw it with the girl I was in love with at the time, the year <i>before</i> she backed out of going to the prom with me like a week before the date (not bitter, guise, honest) as with the fact that I was a dumb teenager who gave a pass to <i>Con Air</i> for Christ's sake. Though even at that age I had functioning brain power greater than that of your average sea slug and so hated <i>The Rock</i>, so I suspect that if I hadn't spent the entire evening with my Latina dream, I would've had much less patience with the parade of idiocy that is <i>Independence Day.</i> <br />
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Speaking of parades, in true disaster movie fashion, <i>Independence Day</i> features a parade of B-grade stars of the day, while of course giving them nothing to do apart from staring at the sky, staring at display screens, and quipping. We've got President Whitmore (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Pullman">Lone Starr</a>), a former fighter pilot (more believable in 1996, a mere 5 years after the Gulf War, the first war that was totally indistinguishable from a video game) for no other reason than to allow him to <i>personally</i> lead the final counterattack on the <strike>Communists</strike> <strike>terrorists</strike> aliens, and his wife Marilyn (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McDonnell">Laura Roslin</a>), a woman who dies so Whitmore will have <i>even moar</i> reason to kill the aliens when he personally leads the final counterattack. (You can see why Emmerich got Academy Award nominee Laura Roslin for this meaty role.) There's computer whiz Jeff Goldblum, who brings down the aliens' impenetrable shield using a virus he uploads to them on a <i>Mac</i> (because computer geniuses use those instead of actual computers) and his offensive Jewish stereotype father (Judd Hirsch) and offensive gay stereotype boss (Harvey Fierstein). Then there are a bunch of military guys who don't really do much, wasting the talents of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Baldwin">Animal Mother</a> and Robert Loggia, plus a small roll for Harry Connick, Jr. when he was inexplicably allowed to be in movies. The star of the film is the special effects department, while the lead role is assayed by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Smith">His Freshness</a> as a Marine Corps pilot so good he's able to fly an alien fighter just by watching a group of them blow his squadron to Hell.<br />
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Plot? Oh, alright, if you haven't figured it out already from the set-up and cast of "characters". Alien ships show up, we don't really do much, aliens annihilate most of our major cities, we attack and lose because they have shields, we don't really do much, Jeff Goldblum creates a Mac virus that can take down the shields, we attack while Jeff Goldblum and Hitch use a captured alien fighter to meet up with the main alien ship and upload the virus, we blow up all of their ships real good, the end. There, I just saved you <i>two and a half hours</i> of your life.<br />
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Really, this film has more down time than Vancouver construction workers. I left out a dozen extraneous characters. There's the subplot of Agent Jay's stripper-girlfriend (played by Vivica Not-Actually-A.-Fox) rescuing the First Lady in a dump truck just long enough for her to share an emotional scene with the Prez in which Lone Starr utterly fails to hold up his end of the scene, and Cousin Eddie's family who hates him (as well they should), and the Secretary of Defense whose only purpose is to be wrong about everything, and stripper-girlfriend's idiot friend who thinks the giant ominous flying saucers hovering menacingly over every major city are friendly, and the President's advisor who used to have a thing going with Jeff Goldblum (do you think this world-destroying crisis will rekindle their romance? have you ever seen a movie before?) and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent_Spiner">Data</a>'s star-breaking turn as an offensive geek-scientist stereotype that would be kicked off the set of <i>The Big Bang Theory</i> for being too broad. God, this movie is tedious even to <i>summarize</i>.<br />
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Probably the biggest problem with <i>Independence Day</i>--apart from its being stupid, boring, poorly acted, poorly directed, annoyingly jingoistic and simplistic, and having Randy Quaid in it--is that it's fundamentally a feel-good movie that involves the deaths of probably a billion people and the likely deaths of a billion more. I don't know, I just don't see us blowing up the aliens real good as a happy ending here, though the film certainly does, with triumphant music and hugs and kisses for our heroes all around. (Our <i>male</i> heroes, of course. Despite having so many goddamn characters, there isn't a single female character that has <i>any</i> impact on the plot. That's right, the military is so short of pilots for the final attack that they draft the drunk, insane, drug-addled fugitive from justice Randy Quaid (who plays a drunk in the movie, too) because he flew military planes 25 years earlier and after that flew crop-dusters, yet there is not a <i>single</i> woman pilot. The human race may be about to be wiped out in this all-or-nothing last-gasp attack, but gender roles must be maintained!)<br />
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I mean, I'm not saying the movie should've been unrelentingly bleak. It is a stupid disaster movie, after all, and not everything with Laura Roslin in it has to be <i>Battlestar Galactica</i>. But come on, people shouldn't be wildly cheering the destruction of the alien ships at the end. A glimmer of hope, a sense of relief, okay, but not unabashed joy and celebration. <i>Billions</i> are dead. I don't think it's time to break out the party hats. <i>Independence Day</i> has been summarized as a '50s alien invasion movie with '90s effects, but that does a grave disservice to its awfulness. Yes, the movie is basically Baby's First Attempt to Copy Golden Age Sci-Fi, so it takes its <i>plot</i> straight out of a '50s flick, definitely including the treading water portion in the middle. (Though in the '50s that was because, for these low-budget films, shooting white guys in lab coats standing around talking was cheap. I don't know what this movie's excuse is.) But it '90s up everything else, and not just the effects. You've got military porn, latent homophobia (whatever it takes to sell tickets, eh, Roland?), the stunt casting of Harry Connick, Jr., the Fresh Prince defeating the aliens with his fists, people staring, Jeff Goldblum saying "Must go faster", people quipping about genocide, close-ups of Harvey Fierstein, a lame environmentalist message, people quipping about anal probes, product placement, moar staring, nuclear problem-solving, cheesy speechifying, people quipping about space travel, occupation shaming, even moar staring, and Animal Mother prevented from being awesome.<br />
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<i>Independence Day </i>is long, boring, and stupid, lacking even one whit of imagination, emotion, or normal human interaction. Or as I prefer to call it, a Roland Emmerich movie. I'm sure the sequel will give us moar of the same. And I suppose I'm okay with that, as long as there's no terrible fake Godzilla in it.Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-35839327899932741342015-12-06T19:14:00.001-08:002015-12-07T00:01:58.419-08:00Fateful FindingsNeil Breen's <i>Fateful Findings</i> is the greatest movie ever made.<br />
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Directed by Neil Breen from a script by Neil Breen, <i>Fateful Findings</i> stars Neil Breen as <strike>Dylan</strike> Neil Breen, the world's greatest hacker who also has the superpowers of shouting incoherently into cellular phones, phasing through solid objects, and making movies that don't make any fucking sense. Director Breen's interpretation of screenwriter Breen is masterful, matched perfectly by the consummate professional editing of Neil Breen and the haunting soundtrack composed and performed by Neil Breen. Only producer Neil Breen could have assembled such a potent combination of talent to create this singular motion picture. If Neil Breen could see how perfectly Neil Breen has brought Neil Breen's vision from page to screen, Neil Breen would bestow upon Neil Breen the prestigious Neil Breen Award for Being Neil Breen, as voted for by the selection committee made up of Neil Breen.<br />
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Given that he has more talent in his bad white guy's Jheri curl combover
than is present in the rest of the human race combined, Neil Breen eschews
filmmaking conventions like editing scenes such that the audience has
any idea how much time has passed, introducing characters
by name or ever assigning them last names, having a plot or indeed a
connection of any kind between scenes, and not kissing the actresses
with all the raw sexual passion of a closeted homosexual trying to
dispel tabloid rumors.<br />
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The film opens with Neil Breen being hit by a car, which is a wonderful way to open a film no matter how you look at it. We then cut to shots of people's shoes and then to awkward upward-looking shots of people in a completely different location, as we in the audience struggle to figure out where these people came from when in the long shots the street was clearly deserted. These non-actors (chosen by avant-garde director Breen for verisimilitude, no doubt) ask if he's okay approximately 30,000 times while no one bothers to answer the question or attempt to help in any way. My favorite guy emphatically declares that it was the Rolls-Royce that struck Breen down, which he knows because he saw the whole thing. Now, lacking the visionary genius of writer/director/producer/editor/Supreme Overlord of the Milky Way Galaxy Neil Breen, I thought maybe one of the other people there might turn to him and say, "Great Scott! You mean the Rolls-Royce currently idling right in front of us with blood dripping from its grill? I would never have guessed <i>that</i> was our dastardly culprit! It is indeed fortunate, my good sir, that you were somehow able to see the whole thing, despite not actually appearing in the earlier scene, else we might never have solved this conundrum!"<br />
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Instead, experimental nonlinear editor Breen intercuts the, er, "action" with shots of Our Breen's vaguely European wife/girlfriend/fuckbuddy/housemaid Emily shouting into her phone, "Dylan? Are you there? Dylan? Dylan, answer! Dylan! Dylan, are you there Dylan? Bueller? Bueller?" Now you might wonder how anyone, even a girl from the same indeterminate Eastern European country that gave us the barely-sentient scientist chick from <i>Werewolf</i>, could possibly still be shouting ineffectually into a cellular phone several minutes after any normal person would assume the connection's been lost. But since Neil Breen has the superpower of never losing his cell phone service, I think we can sympathize with Emily here. We can also sympathize with her because, like every other female character in this movie, visionary filmmaker/creepy pervert Neil Breen refuses to let her wear a bra at any time during the shoot.<br />
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So Our Breen is in the hospital, unconscious. His physician, the esteemed Dr. Unnamed, calls in a neurologist, an almost attractive blond who just so happens to be the girl Our Breen fell in love with when they were both eight years old. We know this because she's still wearing the same shitty Lucky Charms bracelet she wore back then, and later her notebook containing the words "It's a Magical Day" falls out of her pocket (open to the exact page with those words on it, no less) for Neil to find. See, she wrote those words in that old notebook (which looks to be in pretty good shape for the 20-odd years she says she's been carrying it with her constantly "for good luck") on the day she and young Neil found a mushroom, which turned into a box, out of which Neil took a magic rock. And then she put, um, something back in the box, and they left, and it turned into a mushroom again. A Magical Day!<br />
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Now, if you're thinking Dr. Object of Creepy Pedo Lust is here to use her expertise to save Our Neil, well, that's just what director Neil Breen and screenwriter Neil Breen <i>wanted</i> you to think. Our Neil don't <i>need</i> no stinkin' round-the-clock intensive care to treat what his doctor calls severe neurological damage. Instead, he just gets up and leaves the hospital on his own. Has he been in the hospital for a year? A month? A day? 20 minutes? An <i>artiste</i> cares not for these things. It's fortunate for Neil that he's magically healed himself, since there's apparently no one else in the ICU. No other patients, orderlies, receptionists--it's almost as if producer Breen couldn't raise enough money to hire even a single extra to wander through shot. Sure, he <i>could</i> have slapped a lab coat on a grip and had him walk down the hallway with his back to the camera or something, but it's just that kind of pedestrian "real world" thinking that Neil Breen left behind when he ascended to the plane of existence in the multiverse reserved specifically for Neil Breen. Our Neil goes home and takes a shower, whereupon vaguely European wife-or-whatever Emily gets in with him and stands in the pool of blood collecting at his feet while they turn around in circles and then the scene ends.<br />
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Look, if <i>you</i> don't understand the deeper meaning and significance of this scene, <i>I'm</i> certainly not going to explain it to you.<br />
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In a manner that would send Tommy Wiseau into either a state of ecstasy or a jealous rage, conversations veer violently from someone confessing her crippling pill addiction to complaints from the same person that she isn't happy in her current career. Being one of exactly two staff in the ICU, Dr. Creepy Pedo Lust discovers Neil's absence and calls the other staff member, Dr. Unnamed, who declares emphatically "I'll check on it", hangs up, and leaves the movie, never to be seen again. After Neil's buddy is murdered by his wife, wifey <i>also </i>elects to no longer appear. Our Neil refuses to believe wifey's claim that buddy committed suicide, but that claim somehow drives <i>Neil's</i> wife-or-whatever Emily to <i>herself</i> commit suicide out of guilt, thus freeing Neil to bang Dr. Creepy Pedo Lust an impossible-to-figure-out amount of time later, since he's been in love with her since they were both eight, need I remind you. By the way, when buddy is murdered, his daughter offscreen teleports to the crime scene despite having been established as lying face down on a bed in a completely different room. This leads to a hilariously awkward scene in which wifey tries to prevent daughter from getting to the body while daughter struggles to get past her in a manner precisely as believable as a pair of angry dudebros being held back from engaging in fisticuffs by their skanky girlfriends in any given dive bar at 1 am on Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma.<br />
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Our Neil promises to blow the lid off government and corporate corruption, evidence of which he has obtained throughout the movie using his superior h4xx0r skillz. Are you asking what this has to do with Emily's death? Or Neil's reconnection with Dr. Creepy Pedo Lust? Or the murder of his best buddy? Or the daughter's topless swimming in Neil's pool and bathing in Neil's bathtub in an I-saw-<i>American-Beauty</i>-once attempted jailbait seduction of Neil? Because if you are, then frankly you need to go back to your Kurosawa films and your Christopher Nolan films and your Stanley Kubrick films and other such shallow fluff. You are not <i>prepared </i>for the True Art of a Neil Breen film starring Neil Breen from a screenplay by Neil Breen. The film ends with our hero standing in front of a hilariously bad greenscreen image of the Lincoln Memorial and revealing the incredibly vague but highly damning evidence he has uncovered of the crimes of those dastardly One-Percenters, while various government and corporate fat-cats step up and stand before the same horrendous greenscreen image and confess to crimes that are equally nebulous and ill-defined, followed by a cut to each fat-cat committing suicide somewhere else entirely in his or her own unique way. Then a government/corporate sniper takes aim at our hero, only to be killed...somehow...so Neil can continue a hero-exposes-corruption-through-endless-speechifying scene that would put <a href="http://jabootu.net/?p=611">Steven Seagal</a> to shame. Roll credits.<br />
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Neil Breen is the most captivating artist of our time. His artistic creations will be revered and treasured for as long as cinema exists as an art form. Like every film made in France, <i>Fateful Findings</i> is pretentious, purposefully obtuse, and utterly lacking in meaning, coherence, and intelligibility. I shall not look up on its like again.<br />
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Wait...there are two <i>moar</i> Neil Breen films? Oh, bliss! Bliss and heaven..... Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-22786637835911131322015-11-17T11:34:00.000-08:002015-11-17T11:34:04.308-08:00Revisit: Ninja III: The DominationWhen your ol' pal Carl Eusebius was but a wee tot, he loved him some Japan. My age being in but single digits (my IQ of course was already immeasurable due to my godlike intellect), I loved four things: He-Man, Godzilla, Voltron, and ninjas.<br />
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Now you may have noticed that three of those things are Japanese, and all of them are completely fictional. Yes, in the early '80s Japan was still a mystical wonderland full of inscrutable little folk and their quirky habits, like taking their shoes off indoors and brutally subjugating neighboring countries. It was a more innocent time, before hentai, weeaboos, Pikachu and DESU. Ninjas were kind of like Batman before regular people liked Batman. They dressed in cool costumes, moved in the shadows, carried all kinds of gadgets like grappling hooks and caltrops, and kung fu-ed the shit out of guys. And they had fake-ass mythical weaponry that looked awesome despite having not a chance in hell of being actually effective in combat. Xena: Warrior Princess had her chakram, Batman had his batarangs, and ninjas had shuriken. That's a fancy Japanese word for a star-shaped knife ninjas threw at people to one-shot one-kill them. That's right, no matter where the "ninja star" hit you and penetrated up to one-quarter of an inch through your skin, you immediately keeled over dead. And if the ninja felt like getting closer, he had the ninja-to (that's Japanese for "ninja sword" desu), a shittier version of the <i>katana</i> that was cheaper to make since ninjas historically <i>probably </i>weren't magical superhuman assassins but were peasant bandits who resisted samurai rule by murdering samurai in ambushes, at least when they weren't waylaying and robbing upper-class people.<br />
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But we're talking movie ninjas here. The ones who could throw ninja stars and disappear in a cloud of smoke and scale walls barehanded and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorpion_%28Mortal_Kombat%29">take off their masks and breathe fucking fire out of their fleshless undead skulls</a>. And in the early '80s, your movie ninja was Sho Kosugi. For those few years that ninjas were king of young white boys' screens, Sho made a half dozen kickass ninja movies. <i>Enter the Ninja</i>. <i>Revenge of the Ninja</i>. <i>Pray for Death</i>. <i>Nine Deaths of the Ninja</i>. <i>Rage of Honor</i>. In the pre-Jackie Chan <i>Rumble in the Bronx</i> years, this was the best martial arts you were gonna get. While mainstream America had its Chuck Norrises and its Jean-Claude Van Dammes, we young lads who could actually find Japan on a map had Sho. He may not have been any better an actor than The Non-Presence That Kicks or the Muscles from Brussels, but as a martial arts performer, he was the best thing the Empire had until we discovered a little known place called Hong Kong....<br />
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But all good things must come to an end, and the ninja craze ended quickly indeed. By 1984, the genre was already played out, and so of course schlock auteurs Golan and Globus chose this moment to ensure its final destruction by making a ninja movie of their very own. Take ninjas, mix in some aerobics, garnish with a dash of<i> The Exorcist</i>, and you have the death knell of the ninja film, or as I call it, <i>Ninja III: The Domination</i>.<br />
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What can you say about a movie that begins with, to quote a random IMDb person, "the greatest golf course ninja motorcycle helicopter massacre ever put on film." Yes, this movie begins with Evil Ninja murdering, uh, someone, in the middle of a public golf course in broad daylight. (You can see why these cunning assassins were so feared.) Our Evil Ninja proceeds to slaughter approximately 7000 cops who attempt to arrest him, using all of his ninja skills: throwing stars, swords, punching through steel, and editing the film so that motorcycle cops who have already been killed magically appear back on their bikes just in time to crash spectacularly into a river. Two cops in a helicopter, seeing about a dozen cops wiped out by this guy, radio their buddies to "proceed with caution". <i>Proceed with caution?!</i> How about calling in "Officer down!", ya mooks. These two guys politely ignore Evil Ninja as he climbs up a tree directly in front of them and then even more kindly fly very close to the top of the tree so he can climb up the skids and kill them.<br />
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Evil Ninja kills a few more guys until the script finally says the cops can tag him with their guns. They shoot him about 900 times but then foolishly creep slowly up on him to see if he's dead, causing him to immediately pop up and kill another dozen of them. The cops then shoot him approximately 185,000 more times, and this time, finally, he...throws a smoke ball and disappears. I don't know why he bothered to leave, really, since he's proven as vulnerable to gunfire as fucking Superman. While the voices of guys saying things like "Where'd he go?" are dubbed over the scene, the cops disperse to find Our Ninja, whereupon he pops up out of the ground(!). The cops being several entire <i>yards</i> away at this point, he slips away unnoticed.<br />
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Thus ends, ladies and gentlemen, one of the dumbest and most inept action scenes in film history. It's right up there with <i>Future War</i>'s epic battle between Not Jean-Claude Van Damme and Cyborg Ron Jeremy, as they push empty cardboard boxes at each other.<br />
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It turns out Our Ninja is indeed kacked, though sadly not before he happens upon telephone linewoman and aerobics instructor Lucinda Dickey, a true thespian and star of both <i>Breakin'</i> AND <i>Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo</i>. He makes her grab his sword (his <i>ninja</i> sword, you pervs) while he mutters in Japanese, and so our <i>Flashdance</i>-<i>Exorcist</i>-<i>Nine Deaths of the Ninja</i> "plot" begins.<br />
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Every time Lucinda sees one of the cops who shot Evil Ninja to death, we see a flashback of Evil Ninja being shot over 9000 times, and in the next scene Possessed Lucinda murders said cop in some baroque ninja way. Somehow no one ever notices Lucinda's presence at each murder scene shortly before someone turns up dead, nor does anyone see her vehicle (a huge fucking telephone van, mind you) speeding either toward or away from the murder scene. At no point do the police make any connection between the guys getting kacked and the shooting of Evil Ninja, including a cop with moar body hair than fucking Sasquatch who stalks and harasses Lucinda until she agrees to become his mistress and seduces him by pouring V8 all over her breasts. Hairy Cop doesn't bat an eye when Lucinda complains of lost memories, missing time, and unexplained injuries even as his friends on the police force are being systematically murdered by what is clearly a professional assassin. He doesn't think it might be suspicious that she suddenly has a ninja sword that she really doesn't want him to examine. It isn't until he takes her to a <strike>Chinese</strike> Japanese medium (played by consummate professional <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hong">Hannibal Chew</a>), who causes her to talk all reverb-y and then transform into one of the worst dummies you've ever seen, that he finally gets a clue. Now convinced (I guess?) she's possessed, Lucinda tries to aerobics her way out of Evil Ninja's next possession attempt, crying "No, not again!" even though she earlier claimed not to remember the possession episodes, but Evil Ninja's sword-wobbling-on-a-string-in-a-laughable-attempt-to-appear-to-be-floating will not be denied, and Lucinda is possessed again in a scene that is absolutely not a complete rip-off of Sigourney Weaver's possession in <i>Ghostbusters</i>. (God, even <i>mentioning</i> that film on this blog gives me the heebie-jeebies.)<br />
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Fortunately, Sho, looking rather badass in his eyepatch, has been tracking Evil Ninja, who is revealed in a flashback to be the guy who killed Sho's daddy and took his eye. Being rather faster on the uptake than Hairy Cop, Sho realizes that Evil Ninja's spirit is loose and figures out where he'll strike next. Sho intercepts Possessed Lucinda--decked out in the Evil Ninja's spare set of ninja duds that he apparently kept in his secret cave and luckily fit her perfectly--after she caps another of the cops. Sho kung fus her into submission, but of course lets her go when he finds out she's, like, <i>a girl</i>. The cops arrive and arrest Sho as the culprit, even though he's currently nowhere near the crime scene and is dressed nothing like Possessed Lucinda and is wearing a large eyepatch that Lucinda clearly wasn't wearing and he has no weapons and is much taller and proportionally bigger than Lucinda. Other than that, though, it's an airtight case. Hairy Cop gets in the back of the police cruiser with Sho, who tells him to bring Lucinda and Evil Ninja's sword to "the old temple on the hill" (you know the one). Having seen this man exactly twice, one of which is when he's being arrested by his fellow officers, Hairy Cop immediately agrees to do this. He goes home and points his gun at his new squeeze, ordering her to go to the temple. You know, the old one. On the hill. That one.<br />
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Everyone arrives at the climax of the movie. Sho has Evil Ninja's body, so that way the white people can step aside while the Asian guys show their stuff. The last ten minutes of the movie are nonstop fighting, pretty decent ninja fighting for the time, as Sho fights first the monks of the temple (mind-mojoed by the Evil Ninja) and then duels with the Evil Ninja himself. Sho ends up sticking a knife through the top of EN's head (ew!), and Hairy Cop and Lucinda love each other, and the movie just sort of stops.<br />
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<i>Ninja III: The Domination</i> is unquestionably the dumbest movie combining aerobics and ninjas ever made. Fortunately, Sho went on to make <i>Pray for Death</i>, probably the best of the ninja movies. And<i>, </i>the year after <i>Ninja III</i> came out, the Schengen Agreement was signed, creating a passport-free zone in the precursor to the European Union. At least this movie did nothing to prevent that.Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-33409674051609201942015-10-08T06:30:00.000-07:002015-10-08T06:30:30.346-07:00On the Subject of Love and Rutabagas: A Review of Cool as Ice<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Imagine for a moment that an alien species, armed with only the most basic ideas about humans — that they have four limbs jutting out of their torso and a hole in their face that they use to emit speech — had decided to try and replicate early 1990s hiphop culture in a 90 minute film. This would explain much about <i>Cool as Ice</i>.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">At the very least it might explain a lot about the film’s protagonist, “Johnny”, played by the character of Vanilla Ice, played by the character of Robert Van Winkle, played by a person who may once have had hopes and dreams. It might explain why he doesn’t seem to understand how clothing works, and why his attempts at dialogue wouldn’t pass a simple Turing Test. It might even explain why his attempts at romance seems more like the behaviour of a murderous psychotic. But can you really blame them? I mean, those aliens got those face-holes just right! That’s not bad for a race of hideous slime beings who communicate their abominable thoughts telepathically.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Assuming the makers of this film were human, I’m not sure what their excuse is. Thankfully, this movie is so unspeakably over-the-top bizarre that you can’t help but watch it in thrilled amazement.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The movie opens by establishing a few key facts about Our Hero. We see his awesome dance moves, and then watch as he gets the number of a hot chick... much to his friends’ chagrin! Oh, Johnny! You’re incorrigible! Then they all hop on their totally rad motorbikes and ride away into the night with no clear purpose, destination or luggage, and for no obvious reason beyond the fact that the film’s screenwriter must have seen <i>The Wild One</i> once as a teenager. But this little bit of exposition has at least informed us that Our Hero, though himself Safely White, is cool enough to have Black Friends. Duly noted!</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Our Vanilla Hero and his Black Friends eventually arrive at a sleepy vanilla town where one of the bikes breaks down just long enough for the plot to play out, and they take up residence in the home of two elderly eccentrics who promise to fix it for them. This is also the town where we are introduced to Our Hero’s love interest. But I’ll get to her.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Judging by the reactions of these small town folk, they have never seen such dangerous and exciting people as Our Vanilla Hero and his Black Friends. Their reaction falls just short of frothing at the mouth and convulsing, so taken aback are they. </span>In fact, half the fun of this film is how so very, very hard it tries to convince us of the greatness of “Johnny”. Love Interest’s annoying little brother virtually wets himself in excitement every time “Johnny” enters the room, and we can practically feel the film-makers nudging us and gesturing at the screen: “Wow! That guy must be great!” But, because we don’t exactly share the feeling, we find everyone’s instant loss of control over their bodily functions in his presence jarring and strange. As if the film can somehow sense our skepticism, it seems to try all the harder.</div>
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<span class="s1">And so we see him impressing all with his rap skills, mad dance moves, fighting ability, and the calm badassery indicated by the cryptic non-sequiturs that make up 98% of his dialogue. The committee that originally constructed Vanilla Ice in 1990 is pulling out all the stops. Did I mention he has Black Friends? If I may be allowed to quote our protagonist: Awwwwwwww yeah!</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Of course the real plot centres on his gentle wooing of Love Interest, an uptight good girl who has just been waiting for a bad boy with a heart of gold to come along and melt her frigid ways. Instead, she encounters Johnny, a menacing lunatic who dresses like a birthday party clown and has no perceivable grip on reality. Perhaps the most awkward thing about this movie is how every time they try to make “Johnny” seem like a dangerous bad boy, he comes across about as dangerous as a caged gerbil, and it’s only when they try to show his romantic side that he manages to exude a spine-chilling psychosis.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Allow me to describe their first meeting. Our Hero comes upon Miss Goody Two-Shoes out horse-riding in a field near the road. Taking advantage of a conveniently located motorcycle ramp (a prevalent feature in our Johnny’s world), he immediately leaps into the field and terrifies the horse, causing Love Interest to be thrown off. </span>She is plunged to the ground, where her neck is instantly snapped. The rest of the film revolves around Johnny and his friends burying her body in a nearby field and then living out their days haunted by the guilt of what they have done.</div>
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<span class="s1">Ha ha ha just kidding! Her neck unsnapped, Little Miss Uptight tells our Johnny a thing or two before storming off in a sexy huff. Never before has one of Johnny’s attempted manslaughters resulted in anything other than a lady’s undergarments firing off into the stratosphere, and this new challenge is too much of an allure to deny. And so it begins. Or to quote our eloquent Lothario: “Yep yep, she likes me.”</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Though myself no expert in romance, this I do know: if your love interest manages to just barely survive your first encounter with her spine intact, then you’re off to a good start. But Our Hero is no first-timer in the ancient dance of seduction. To seal the deal, he also seizes the first opportunity to steal her organizer. You can’t properly </span><span class="s2"><strike>stalk </strike></span><span class="s1">win a lady if you don’t know where she’s going to be 24 hours a day, you dumb n00bs!</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Naturally, Love Interest has a douchey boyfriend. As all </span><span class="s2"><strike>terrifying stalkers </strike></span><span class="s1">true romantics know, a hot girl’s boyfriend is always a douchey prick, from whom it is your task to save her. She needs to drop that zero, and get with the hero! And so she is slowly, but surely, romanced by Our Hero as he nearly kills her, steals her personal information, and then breaks into her bedroom to watch her sleep. What’s hotter than a guy who literally will not take no for an answer? Well.. other than a sparkling, Mormon <a href="http://mistermunshun.blogspot.ca/2012/12/twilight-psychic-surveillance.html">Vampire</a> who literally won't take no for an answer? When she wakes up to find him in her bedroom, he slips an ice cube into her waiting mouth and watches the water trickle down from her lips. I’m not sure the scene quite works, but to be fair to the film-makers it’s always a tricky balance trying to fit your graphic underaged girl rape fantasies into a PG pop music star vehicle targeted at 12 year olds. It’s just hard getting the <i>tone</i> right, you know?</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Meanwhile, a subplot is awkwardly inserted into the story in order to add tension, and (spoilers ahead!) to give Our Hero a chance to save the day. Michael Grossman (AKA the dad from <i>Family Ties</i>) is given a series of increasingly dark scenes to reveal a secret that he had been keeping from his family: he is a former cop, now in witness protection. A foolish decision, played out in a moment of loving pride for his daughter, puts him on the local news. This single act of carelessness places his entirely family in danger as his identity is made known to two ruthless criminals. Family Ties Dad watches helplessly as his carefully constructed life crumbles all around him.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">If that last paragraph seems oddly out of place in tone and content, then, yes, you have been paying attention. Especially since it’s clear that Family Ties Dad was not informed that this movie was supposed to be cartoonishly surreal. He plays these scenes straight, leaving us thinking “Oh yeah, acting exists!” but also making everyone feel slightly uncomfortable. It’s worth keeping in mind that our introduction to this same, dark, brooding father character is a sped-up hallucinogenic fever-dream that shows him gleefully reading the newspaper in fast-forward. Instead of a DVD commentary, this film needs a chart on the side of the screen displaying exactly how much coke the film-makers had snorted into their faces before shooting each scene.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Up until now, Family Ties Dad was Johnny’s foil, the strict dad who’s too square to let his hot daughter date a dangerous bad boy. I guess we’re supposed to root for Johnny, but as this dark subplot plays out we’re left thinking that he’s probably right to be protective of his family when a 20-something stranger comes out of nowhere and starts </span><span class="s2"><strike>stalking </strike></span><span class="s1">courting his teenaged daughter. When Johnny sees the same TV interview that captured the criminals’ interest, he glares menacingly at the screen as his Love Interest appears on the screen. As a viewer, I sure know which threat <i>I’m</i> more concerned about.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">If you’re as tired of the film’s “plot” as I am, allow me to jump to the end: the plot concludes when Johnny saves the day by making use of yet another conveniently located motorcycle ramp to crash into the abandoned construction site where Love Interest’s kidnapped brother (oh yeah, that happened) is being held. This is the same sexy construction site (aww yeah!) where Johnny and Love Interest once spent a romantic montage. Yes, that happened too. You assume correctly that annoying little brother immediately loses control of his bladder when he sees his hero Johnny, and the film concludes with a tiresome rap/dance sequence. You may not have noticed, but this movie stars Vanilla Ice — the rap star!</span></div>
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<span class="s1">But the plot really doesn’t matter. The real mystery at the heart of this film is why it’s so goddamn fun to watch. Part of it is, of course, the macabre pleasure of watching the career death of a carefully constructed human consumer product with literally no charisma. But I swear that most of the fun comes from that alien quality of the whole production. The fun doesn't come</span> <i>only</i> from the fact that the film has a star who seems convinced the entire spectrum of human emotions can be expressed by raising his right eyebrow and holding it there as long as he can endure. It also comes from how the characters who <i>do</i> seem to be reasonably sane seem totally unfazed whenever they're suddenly plunged into scenes of disconcerting madness, like the acid trip moments with their eccentric elderly bike repairmen. Strangest of all is the dystopian Sugar Shack, where all of the teenagers dress like stereotypes from a 1950s nerd convention and stare off sadly into the distance. Marty McFly ACTUALLY going back to 1955 seemed less out of place than Our Hero appears in this weirdly unexplained club.<br />
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The strangest moments come from the few actors who accidentally give convincing portrayals of human behaviour. This makes the vertigo-inducing weirdness of the rest of the movie seem even stranger in contrast. Kristin Minter, playing Love Interest, actually gives a half-decent performance as a girl experiencing her first real love/lust, and comes across as both likeable and attractive. But whenever the gibbering loon that is “Johnny” appears in the scene as the object of that affection, the effect is about as strange as if his role had been played by a sentient rutabaga.<br />
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So why is this movie so fun? Well, just think... a movie about a rapping rutabaga winning the love of an ordinary teenaged girl? Who <i>wouldn’t</i> want to watch that?</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03512957036934181876noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-14125105244012010642015-09-07T13:01:00.002-07:002015-11-21T15:04:29.190-08:00The Cold Equations<i>The Cold Equations </i>is the greatest movie ever, if only because it features the gruesome death of possibly the most slap-worthy character in the history of cinema.<br />
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<i>The Cold Equations </i>was produced by the Sci-Fi Channel back when it had a dignified name and tried to create actual content instead of <i>Sharknado</i>. It's a fairly straightforward re-telling of the classic '50s short story on which it's based, with everything you'd expect from a '90s sci-fi cheapie: uneven acting that ranges from bland to atrocious, shockingly cheap sets and costumes, even cheaper special effects that manage to be embarrassing despite appearing for upwards of 1 minute total of the 93-minute running time, and an evil corporation doing evil things for money, and also to be evil. All very routine, except for that character I mentioned. We'll get to that.<br />
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The short story is an effective little yarn, written by a fellow named Tom Godwin in 1954, very short and very direct. A man is delivering a supply of desperately needed medical supplies to an off-world colony in a spaceship carrying precisely the amount of fuel it needs to reach its destination. He discovers a girl named Marilyn who stowed away in an attempt to visit her brother in the colony. Stowing away is illegal because of the whole no-spare-fuel thing and, since carrying extra weight means death for all aboard, the penalty is ejection into space (though the government neglected to explain that last part, meaning the poor girl thinks she's only in for a fine or a brief stint in jail). So our man Barton is ordered to dump the bitch toot-sweet, not just to save his own hide but also to save the millions of colonists soon to die of whatever disease it is they have. Once she recognizes the gravity of her situation, Marilyn is permitted to speak briefly with her brother on the wireless and then willingly enters the airlock.<br />
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Now, some people hate the story because of how contrived the situation is. It's bad engineering not to have <i>any</i> margin for error, and it's pretty ridiculous that the government wouldn't make it clear that the punishment for stowing away is <i>death</i>. But these kinds of criticisms miss the point; the plots of a lot of short stories, if you take a few moments to think about them, don't really hold up. Generally short stories quickly limn a set-up and then deliver some sort of emotionally shocking conclusion. The gut impact is the important part. Think of "A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar..." type jokes. Why are they there? Who cares. The set-up is just there to get you to the punchline.<br />
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Viewed that way, "The Cold Equations" can work on a number of levels. You could see it as a meditation on the futility of human action, its downbeat conclusion a rejection of the old "Damn it, we'll <i>find </i>a way!" kind of story that always has the main characters finding a solution <i>just in time</i>. You could look at it as a rebuttal to the notion that technology will inevitably overcome any problem nature throws at us *<i>coughclimatechangecough*</i>. Or maybe it's a comment on how people (Barton and Marilyn), no matter how competent, are at the mercy of others' incompetence (the engineers who designed and built the spacecraft) or bureaucratic corruption and negligence (the decision-maker who okay'd the ship's minimalist design). Or perhaps it's a story of human morality--one person sacrificing herself to save countless others. Or of responsibility--that your actions may have unintended consequences, and you just have to deal. Or a number of other interpretations I haven't thought of.<br />
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What it <i>wasn't</i> was the story of a horrible selfish bitch who keeps your eyes glued to the screen in hopes of relishing her slow and painful death.<br />
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As noted, the movie follows the story, though they have to stretch it to feature length by adding in a movie dystopia (somehow spaceship travel runs entirely on the backs of a vague exploited underclass, and the smallest violation of any law for any reason is harshly punished), a corporate greed subplot (it turns out the medical supplies are in fact a vaccine to <i>prevent</i> a disease the colonists haven't got yet), and, yes, a goddamn love story. Apparently if a film doesn't feature somewhat attractive people sucking face and declaring their love and willingness to die for each other--despite the fact that they've known each other for a grand total of about <i>two hours</i>--then we cretinous imbeciles in the audience will scratch our thick monkey craniums and change the channel. All this I expected (like the love story), or at least wasn't surprised to find (once it became clear the government/corporation was eeeevil, I suspected the medical supplies would turn out to be bogus). What really torpedoes the movie is the character of the girl, inexplicably named Lee in the movie.<br />
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Upon being told that her actions have doomed not only Barton but the colonists (including her own brother, let's not forget), Lee's response is to flatly refuse to leave and to berate Barton for wanting to murder her. Now, this might be an understandable initial response, but here's the thing: She does this <i>for the entire movie</i>. She demands that Barton instead lighten the ship's load enough to make up for her 108 extra pounds. (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Basinger">You weigh a little more than a 108.</a>) Barton makes clear that The Company built the ship without any unnecessary weight to save on cost, since it's a disposable vehicle for a one-way trip, so there's nothing to jettison. (Why the company would care about costs, given that it has no competitors and also serves as a totalitarian government, is naturally left unexplained.) In fact, in the pre-flight checkout, Barton was 2 pounds over weight because he was carrying a portable music player, which he was required to leave behind. Lee then suggests ditching his cargo, prompting Barton to tell her what he's carrying. Once she understands the cargo is medical supplies that must be delivered in order to save an entire colony of people (again, including her brother), Lee <i>attacks Barton and attempts to jettison the supplies to save her own ass.</i><br />
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Now, I was already totally fine with spacing this bitch in the first place because she's so goddamned annoying, but really, we're now beyond the pale. What the makers of this film don't seem to understand (and neither do the morons on the IMDb, who gave this piece of shit decent reviews and particularly loved the pluckiness of the female lead and the "romance" of it all) is that Lee is the <i>villain</i> here. In any decent action movie, science fiction or no, the person fucking over the innocent to save his own hide is <i>the bad guy</i>, and the hero <i>fights against that person</i>. Remember in <i>Aliens</i> when Burke locks himself in another room and refuses to let the other characters in just to save himself? Remember what happens? Burke escapes LV-426 while the other characters die horribly, right? He flies home sipping caviar while the credits roll?<br />
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Oh that's right, he gets an alien proboscis through the fucking face because that movie <i>didn't suck.</i><br />
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This movie, on the other hand, continually tries to get us to sympathize with Lee. She's plucky, you see, so she starts tearing the ship apart to find extra weight to throw out, while Barton stands there and doesn't grease her stupid ass. Turns out there's a shit-ton of extra weight that can safely be thrown out of this ship built without any unnecessary parts in order to minimize weight and cost for its one-way trip. This includes a first-aid kit the size of a goddamn suitcase and the insulation that keeps the occupant of the ship warm. The latter is torn off of every wall and thrown out with <i>absolutely no adverse effects</i>. Okay, I'm being totally unfair. Lee at one point does say she feels a bit chilly and rubs her arms a little. Why yes, she <i>is </i>dressed solely in a "sexy" tank top while Barton's in a full-body space suit, so I guess the corporation that built this ship without any unnecessary parts in order to minimize weight and cost for its one-way trip wanted to make sure under-dressed "hot" female stowaways would be nice and warm in the few minutes they're on the ship before they get blasted out of the fucking airlock for breaking the law. Those corporate bastards, always concerned about the bottom line.<br />
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There's also enough food for two people, even though the trip takes three hours <i>tops</i>. You don't get fucking <i>peanuts </i>on a budget airline for a three-hour trip, yet this one-person spacecraft built without any unnecessary parts in order to minimize weight and cost for its one-way trip has full meals! For two! And there's a functioning space toilet. For a trip lasting upwards of 180 minutes. I guess the Department of Defense contracted this thing.<br />
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Lee finds enough stuff to toss to offset half of her weight (good thing she knows moar about the ship than Barton, who said there was nothing they could afford to lose--what a dope!). Man, Barton ought to be pissed that he wasn't allowed to bring his <i>two-pound music player</i> earlier. But now they're really out of stuff to drop (yes, really for reals this time), after Barton <i>again</i> rejects her demand that he dump the supplies. About this point I started to fantasize about Laura Roslin showing up on the ship, whispering sweetly to Lee that everything will be okay, and then airlocking the bitch without a second thought. Alas, Mary McDonnell didn't feel moved to descend from Mount Olympus and save this poor sinner, and I began to panic at the thought of there being 45 more minutes of this crap left to go. Our two zeroes have a heart to heart, where she tries to go all I'm a member of the exploited underclass, this is your fault (lolwut), why don't you buck the system and defy your orders (and thereby ensure both our deaths, though she doesn't say that part), yadda yadda. Then she tries to choke him to death with her bootlace.<br />
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You know, nothing makes me fall in love with a woman faster than having her attempt to strangle me from behind with an old shoelace. "At the moment my vision began to fade out and I felt my major organs shutting down, that's what I knew she was the one for me. Ah, the memories."<br />
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Barton turns the tables on her and carries her unconscious to the airlock as I cheered at the screen and made some popcorn. At the last moment she wakes up and begs him not to do it, even as he's stuffing her in and sealing the door behind her. But he hesitates, and I shout profanities at the screen; there are 30 minutes of this movie left and I realize this Sci-Fi channel shitfest doesn't have the balls to space the bitch. No, I'll be forced to watch some contrived scenario that allows one of the most truly loathsome characters I've ever endured to survive the movie.<br />
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Blah blah they figure out the medical supplies are bogus, so they dump them. Then they fuck so we know they love each other, with all the passion they've built up over the last two hours of shouting, punching and elbowing, beating into unconsciousness, and choking with shoelaces. Once they dump the supplies, the ship is under the required weight, but oh noez! That was the calculation from 2 hours ago, but now they've traveled those 2 hours overweight, so now they need to lose another 100 pounds to make it! Nobody could've seen that coming, certainly not the highly-trained spaceship pilot! Well, and me, and about 20 minutes into the movie. You know a sci-fi film is shit when its grasp of actual science is worse than mine.<br />
<br />
So we get the scene where <strike>Marilyn</strike> Lee talks by wireless with her brother (whose performance blows the doors off the two leads', though that's not saying all that much), and then....<i>YES! FUCKIN' A! WOOOOOO! DIE BITCH DIE!* </i>etc. etc. as she finally, <i>finally</i> gets airlocked. I can honestly say I've never been so happy to be proven wrong by a film, nor so happy to see someone die. Nor am I likely to be ever again, at least until Roose Bolton gets a knife to the dick and wears his balls as a hat. <span style="font-size: x-small;">The North remembers.</span><br />
<br />
Time to get to the end of this crap. There's a framing story I haven't mentioned before because it's only (kind of) relevant now. The corporation has been investigating the loss of the medical supplies, interviewing characters in the movie, and now they're finally bringing in Barton to pronounce sentence upon him. This dastardly dictatorship, prepared to send miners into an area where a deadly fungus grew just for <i>profit</i>...okay, only after they had a vaccine to inoculate them first. Which they provided free of charge. That presumably cost a great deal to develop, mass-produce, and deliver to the colony--look, shut up! They're <i>evil</i>, alright? The Party or the Corporation or whatever Evil Gubmint it is punishes this brazen act of defiance with...<br />
<br />
...<br />
...wait for it...<br />
...<br />
<br />
...<i>fifteen years in prison</i>! Oh the horror, the horror!<br />
<br />
Look, I'm not saying 15 years in prison--or any time in prison--is a cakewalk, but really, I expect more from my humanity-controlling greedy totalitarian dystopia corpo-governments. At least make him love Big Brother and then kack him, or something. Sheesh! You guys really suck at brutal totalitarian dictatorship. Mao Zedong would've executed Barton, his family, his dogs and cats, his goldfish, his neighbors, anybody who met him or wanted to meet him or saw a picture of him one time or thought maybe they might've seen him somewhere 'cause he's got that kind of face that just seems so familiar...and you give the guy a lousy nickel-and-dime in minimum security white-collar resort prison?<br />
<br />
And of course, it's implied that this small act of defiance in the name of <strike>getting laid</strike> freedom will somehow inspire others to bring the corporation down and awaken liberty throughout the universe. Sure. <br />
<br />
Fuck this movie with a chainsaw-shaped dildo.<br />
<br />
=================================================<br />
*Actual things I shouted at the screen in glee, probably confusing, not to mention annoying, my neighbors.Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-5807685632729408462015-05-30T15:06:00.000-07:002017-08-10T20:33:53.480-07:00Hong Kong 97<i>Hong Kong 97 </i>is the worst John Woo fan film you've never seen. It's got it all--hitman main characters, lots of guys getting shot, lots of slow-mo, guys firing two guns whilst jumping through the air, exaggerated blood bursts, a girl who disapproves of the hero's hitman lifestyle but loves him anyway--and all executed in the most amateur and inept fashion possible.<br />
<br />
Naturally, I loved it.<br />
<br />
The film is so desperate to be a Woo picture that it's set in Hong Kong itself, and some scenes are even shot there. That's right, Albert Pyun--one of the worst cheapo directors working today--was so determined to make his own version of <i>A Better Tomorrow</i>
that he actually got some poor production company to fund location
shooting in Hong Kong. Well, exteriors at least. Every time we go inside
a building, you can bet we're now in the Philippines, because there it's much
cheaper to hire guys to clutch their chests and fall over.<br />
<br />
The film opens on a tuxedo-clad <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Patrick">T-1000</a> in a godawful hairdo on the eve of Hong Kong's handover to the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_aXcH1zDEE">fuckin' ugly reds</a> while vaguely "Chinese" music plays. I assumed he was in the tux because it's the night before the handover, but nobody else is dressed up, so I think he's dressed like that just because it looks cool. He's also wearing a duster, since, you know, Chow Yun-fat wore a duster when he shot up the gangsters in <i>A Better Tomorrow</i>. He takes a boat to a Hong Kong restaurant I've been to, though when I had dinner there, I don't recall there being a topless hottie gyrating just inside the front door. That's probably because, as noted, he didn't actually go into the restaurant, instead magically teleporting inside a completely different building somewhere in the Philippines.<br />
<br />
The T-1000 acquires his target, a military honcho in full uniform(!), and draws his pistol on the naked gyrating lady(?). She rather graciously moves out of his way so he can shoot the honcho. Good thing she didn't panic and freeze so that he couldn't get a clear shot! He takes out the honcho's two bodyguards (I guess?) in slow-mo with exaggerated blood bursts, and man, <i>Hard Boiled</i> this ain't. He then draws a bead on the honcho's blond female companion, and...leaves. Okay, so he doesn't want to shoot her because she isn't armed? Or because he knows her? Or he doesn't shoot ladies? Or...what? Later dialogue will establish he's a super bad-ass assassin who kills strictly for money and has no compassion. So why didn't he cap the bitch, especially since she was the only one in the place who unquestionably got a clear look at his face? I'm absolutely sure this was unintentional on Pyun's part, but it really comes across as he doesn't want to shoot a fellow member of the Master Race.<br />
<br />
Back in Hong Kong, the T-1000 "exits" the restaurant, again making it perfectly clear that what we just saw didn't actually take place therein. (We can see through its windows that the dominant color inside the restaurant is red, while the previous scene was conspicuously blue/green.) He jumps into a boat piloted by (we'll soon see) his lover, and they speed away. Then we see a guy in an office somewhere speaking German while a reporter from Blank Gray Wall News tells us about the murder in the most stilted and robotic fashion possible.<br />
<br />
Cut to our second set of breasts in 90 seconds. Being a shitty B movie before the widespread availability of Internet pornography, there's a lot of tits in <i>Hong Kong 97</i>, which is just about the only aspect of the movie <i>not</i> cribbed from John Woo. The T-1000 is railing his girlfriend, who I have to say is a good bit hotter than Ming Na, though I may be a bit biased since the actress playing her is pretty enthusiastic in her simulated sex with the humanoid robot Robert Patrick. (Ha! It is a funny, because Robert Patrick was the T-1000 in <i>Terminator 2</i>!) Anyway, I guess Patrick's a-murderin' got their juices flowing, eh? Eh? Now, Ming Na hasn't appeared yet, but she's 3rd-billed in this stinker and the only actress in the opening credits I've heard of, so she <i>will</i> be Patrick's love interest. That's just how these things work.<br />
<br />
Girlfriend notices a group of ninjas(!) about to attack them, so we get another slow-mo John Woo ripoff shoot-out. And this time, yes, Patrick has two guns, though he can't fly through the air since the set isn't big enough and we might see the little Patrick.<br />
<br />
So for those keeping track, in less than 3 minutes, we've already had two naked Asian ladies and two John Faux gun battles. (Yes, the ninjas have guns, though they apparently skipped the part where they learned to aim them.) You can't say Pyun didn't give his audience what they wanted. If only his audience wanted a good movie.<br />
<br />
The shoot-out ends when Girlfriend kills the last ninja to enter the room, whereupon both she and Patrick seem to realize the scene is over and walk over to the broken window the ninjas came through (by a <i>total coincidence</i> giving us another look at their bare asses). Hey guys, how do you know there aren't more ninjas coming? Do ninjas always travel in groups of six, so you knew once you got all six, the scene was over? And really, having just been shot at by assassins, should you be parading around naked in front of a window? Having successfully fought off this *<i>cough* </i>deadly attack, the happy couple exchange some truly inspired terrible dialogue. <br />
<br />
He: "Are you alright?"<br />
She: "Yeah. But should [<i>sic</i>] get out of here, dis greatly [<i>sic</i>]."<br />
"I'm sorry, I really wasn't expecting any of this."(!)<br />
"Yeah, is it not strange for such a swift attempt at retribution?"<br />
<br />
Well, I don't know, your murder was reported on Blank Gray Wall News <i>before you even got home</i>, so this retribution doesn't seem particularly swift for this universe.<br />
<br />
Cut to the Hong Kong Club. (You know the one.) Inside is....oh lord. It's Brion James, doing a fucking <i>terrible</i> English accent. Now as anyone who's read my <a href="http://mistermunshun.blogspot.com/2012/10/ejo-review-blade-runner.html"><i>Blade Runner</i> review</a> knows, I love me some Brion James, but a posh Englishman? No. James is a heavy, and he's very good at it. He's not an upper-crust British gentleman. Even his accent agrees with me, since it occasionally abandons him. The German guy from earlier is also there, and apparently these three are former super-spies who are now super assassins. We know this because they <i>openly discuss Patrick's recent murder in the locker room of the tennis club</i>. Okay, I'm being unfair. Any time they notice someone nearby, they look at him suspiciously and stop talking, only resuming their fervent whispering once the person has gotten <i>at least</i> 3 feet away. Clearly these guys are pros.<br />
<br />
A fourth man is also there, played by the Dollman himself, Tim Thomerson(!!), who is friends with James and Patrick (but not German guy, I guess, since Herr Walk-on disappears from the movie at the end of this scene). Despite his close friendship with the two, Thomerson apparently doesn't know they're professional assassins. Cut to the three men in the sauna talking about meaningless bullshit. Why is this scene in the movie? I'll give you three guesses, but here's a hint: Each of our three zeroes is supplied with a naked Asian lady to massage him.<br />
<br />
The three then go to visit their friend? associate? business partner? acupuncturist? Whatever. They go visit Wong (how original), rolling up to the gate of his home in an SUV. Workmen outside the gate do workmen stuff in a way that absolutely doesn't look suspicious at all and I'm sure is perfectly legitimate and not going to lead to another shitty action sequence. The gate doesn't open, so Patrick gets out and shouts, "Wong! Wong" at the gate. Still no answer. All three guys clamber out of the SUV and discuss how weird it is that Wong doesn't answer. Patrick catches up to the audience (in this case, me) and realizes an ambush is imminent, so he opens the back of the SUV and starts handing everybody guns. Yes, including Thomerson, the guy who isn't an assassin and has never held a gun in his life. Once the three men are well armed (Patrick himself sports an Uzi), the workmen then reveal that, ah-ha! They're bad guys. Shootout ensues. I have to say, it was awfully nice of the bad guys to let Patrick finish distributing the guns right in front of them before they struck. Because otherwise it would've been really unfair.<br />
<br />
Long story short (too late!), Patrick has to go on the run, so James takes him to the one place the bad guys--well, the bad<i>der</i> guys, I guess--won't look for him: his old fiance's house. Yeah, they'll never suspect a guy on the run might turn to his Ex-Girlfriend Who Still Obviously (and I mean <i>obviously</i>--we're talking Ming Na here) Carries a Torch for Him. She isn't home when he breaks into her apartment, so when she comes home, she immediately starts kicking his ass. Ha! But the joke is, she didn't mistake him for a burglar but knew it was him all along and is kicking his ass because she's mad at him for leaving her. Har fucking har. Okay, she hasn't actually said any of that yet, so I might end up with a lot of egg on my face when I continue the movie...oh, I'm right. Get me a hotline, baby, I'm psychic! They angst a bit about their past relationship, during which Ming Na's
quaint old Chinese granddad, sporting his best Charlie Chan "Oh, so
solly" phoney-baloney accent, lets us know that he's totally okay with her boyfriend being an assassin-for-hire, because he treats her well.<br />
<br />
It turns out granddad is an enemy of the Communists, so he and Ming Na are making sure to get out before the handover. After some endlessly tedious dialogue that I'll spare you, she asks Patrick to come with. He notes that "the tanks roll in a midnight", but she retorts that it's only 8:00, so he has plenty of time before their flight out of Hong Kong "in a few hours"(!!!). Uh, last time I checked, a few is "three or four", meaning she can't possibly mean a flight leaving earlier than 11:00. That's cutting it just a <i>bit</i> close, don't you think?<br />
<br />
Shots ring out, to which Ming Na doesn't react so Patrick can tackle her to the floor. Gun drawn, he--um, genius, the slide's locked. That means no bang-bang. (This guy's a pro?) False alarm, though. It's just two revelers on the street randomly firing pistols in the air. Where do these guys think they are? Detroit?<br />
<br />
Patrick goes...somewhere, and there's moar tits (come on, now) and another shootout. A white hitman puts a pistol to Patrick's head and says there's a huge bounty on him. Then he lets him go because of the professional code of the assassin(!). Okay, whatever, dude. I guess "paid assassin" doesn't mean what I thought it meant. Again, it really just comes across as white people, who in this movie mow down Asian guys by the dozen, not wanting to kill each other. Patrick gets picked up by his buddies while Thomerson bitches about not being told that Patrick was a hitman. James finally shuts him up by revealing Patrick's Secret Pain while Patrick meanders around outside the car, getting back in at the precise moment James finishes the story. It's almost as if he read the script and knew when James would finish talking. James speculates on how the bad guys found out about Patrick, since he'd never left a trail before. Patrick gets indignant. "I didn't leave a trail this time."<br />
<br />
Didn't leave a trail this time, you say? Now, I've only seen the movie once, so I might be wrong here, but I do believe he left something of a clue this time. What was it? Give me a second here to remember.....Oh, yeah. <i>It was the blond woman you left alive after she got a clear look at your face, you asshat!</i><br />
<br />
It turns out Patrick has agreed to run away with Ming Na and granddad. Um, what about the girl you were railing like 24 hours ago? The one who piloted your escape boat and saved your ass from the ninjas when you ran out of bullets? Nevermind that, we've got another shitty action sequence to get to. Cut to the three boarding the plane. Since the movie's only half over, we know he's not getting on that plane. Hmm, let's see...Thomerson and James are also there, and Thomerson can't fight, and this is a John Woo rip-off, so...can anyone not see where this is going? Do I need to draw a diagram for you?<br />
<br />
Suddenly, just when we most expect it, the bad guys attack! Patrick, being the pro, immediately leads Ming Na and granddad <i>away from the plane and over to James's car</i>. Um, you were standing right outside the door of a <i>fucking plane</i>. Just get on the <i>plane and leave, you asshole.</i> Thomerson grabs two pistols and runs towards them. Gee, I hope the elderly untrained bureaucrat won't--oh, there he goes. Pathos, etc.<br />
<br />
Our remaining <strike>murderous hitmen</strike> heroes seek another way to escape, never mind they voluntarily left the <i>fucking airplane waiting to take them to safety</i>. They meet up with Girlfriend from the opening scene. Turns out she's both Patrick's fuckbuddy and his student in a-murderin'. She greets him with a kiss, as Ming Na reacts with (I think--we're talking Ming Na here) a look of jealousy. Hey, remember what I said about Ming Na's billing in the credits? I hope Girlfriend has been keeping up with her life insurance premiums.<br />
<br />
Moar bad guys attack as they flee to a boat. Girlfriend stays behind to cover their escape, because she "has another way out of the city". Oh noez, I really and truly hope she doesn't die tragically saving the others--oh, she does. Pathos, etc. <br />
<br />
In an interlude, Ming Na asks Patrick to tell her about Girlfriend. Oh, you mean the one you just stole him away from? The one who just died to save your candy ass? You want him to tell you about her, as if you give a shit? Because you <i>will</i> end up with Patrick when this piece of shit is over, never mind that this woman who meant so much to him (he gets all emotional talking about her--well, as emotional as Robert Patrick can manage) just got kacked like an hour ago. The Plot-o-Matic 3000 will have it no other way.<br />
<br />
Out for blood, Patrick and James go to take down the bad guys once and for all.
(James got a hacker to figure out who they were earlier in the picture.) Ming Na is also there, even though she's also completely untrained. Blah blah shooting, blood bursts, Filipino guys clutching their chests and falling over, the blonde woman from the opening sequence appears.....and is immediately gunned down by Patrick. Pyun gives us a flashback we don't need so we'll remember who blondie is, a flashback that is <i>longer than she's onscreen before Patrick kacks her.</i> Well, <i>that </i>was some payoff. <br />
<br />
But,
there's a traitor! Can you guess who it is? Seriously, I want you to
guess. Ha! You'll never get it. It's the German guy who had like four
lines and disappeared 3 minutes into the--oh, you guessed that. Oh. Ohh.
Ohhhhhhh--<br />
<br />
This prompts James to turn on Patrick as well. I would like you to know that <i>I totally believed this</i> and <i>in no way</i> expected that James was faking and was in fact getting Herr Traitor to lower his guard so he and Patrick could shoot everybody. So I was <i>completely stunned</i> when that's exactly what happened, let me tell you.<br />
<br />
The film ends with everybody shot in the arm. Seriously, Patrick, James, and Ming Na all take gunshots to the arm. Then they ride off into the sunrise on the boat, as Patrick and Ming Na kiss. Aw, they've reconciled, what must be <i>hours</i> after Girlfriend rather conveniently sacrificed herself for their True Love. Excuse me, I think I'm getting a bit misty....<br />
<br />
Is <i>Hong Kong 97</i> terrible? Well, I already said it's directed by Albert Pyun, so we know the answer to that question. But if you're like me--and God help you if you are--and love bottomlessly awful John Woo ripoffs, you'll enjoy. I give it the Official Carl Eusebius Shit Seal of Approval.Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-83197249928762653862015-04-30T08:53:00.001-07:002015-04-30T08:53:12.620-07:00Revisit: Masters of the UniverseNow that we've heard <a href="http://mistermunshun.blogspot.com/2015/02/five-good-things-about-masters-of.html">Five Good Things about it</a>, it's time to rip into this piece of shit.<br />
<br />
With <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Force_Awakens"><i>Star Wars VII: The Apology</i></a> on the horizon, it may be hard to remember what it was like to be in the '80s. <i>Star Wars</i> was bigger than Jesus, and oh man the rip-offs just kept a-comin'. (Then again, <i>Star Wars</i> is <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0449010/?ref_=nv_sr_1">still being ripped off in the '00s</a>. Ah, the moar things change...) What else was big in the '80s? A little Filmation animated series called <i>He-Man and the Masters of the Universe</i>, that's what. Well, maybe "animated" is a little strong, we <i>are </i>talking Filmation here. Based on a line of <strike>dolls</strike> action figures, <i>He-Man</i> was the story of a mild-mannered weightlifter locked in endless struggle with an animated skeleton wizard. Now if that doesn't say <i>Star Wars</i> to you, then you possess a modicum of decency, meatbag. If you're really into the '80s--and God help you if you are--you'll immediately realize that this movie <i>should</i> have ripped off <i>Conan the Barbarian</i>.<br />
<br />
The plot, such as it is, in brief: On the planet Eternia, Skeletor (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Langella">Richard Nixon</a>),
dressed in his finest Emperor Palpatine regalia, has finally captured
Castle Grayskull, the home of the powerful Sorceress and the center of all Good in the universe. He was able to do this because of the Cosmic Key, a magical teleportation device
invented by Gwildor (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000863/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Noodles MacIntyre</a>), the Odious Comic Relief alien, that
allowed him to teleport his entire army inside the Castle, bypassing its
defenses. As he drains the Sorceress's power, Skeletor waits for the
Stars to Align So He Can Gain Ultimate Power, blah blah, you know the
drill. The only hope for the forces of Good is He-Man (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolph_Lundgren">Ivan Drago</a>),
the ripply muscle-y barbarian arch-nemesis of Skeletor. He-Man leads the
remaining resistance forces, apparently consisting entirely of two other people, Man-at-Arms (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0194230/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Major Dad's boss</a>) and his daughter Teela (Chelsea Field).
Skeletor, recognizing the power of the Key, also desires to eliminate
Gwildor to prevent anyone else from having one. Unfortunately, for him,
Gwildor already has another Key, and as the resistance and Skeletor
fight for possession of him, he activates it, but without carefully
programming the coordinates for a destination. Can you guess where
He-Man and Co. end up in their random teleportation somewhere in the
universe? Perhaps an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet
orbiting a small, unregarded yellow sun far out in the uncharted
backwaters of the unfashionable end of the galaxy?<br />
<br />
Ah yes,
it's the "fantasy heroes come to Earth" money-saving plot, favorite of
tight-fisted movie producers the world over. Because the script says so,
our four zeroes all end up in the same 20-square-foot area while the Key itself
ends up miles away (?), where it's found by Kevin (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Duncan_McNeill">Tom Paris</a>), the boyfriend of Julie (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courteney_Cox">TV's Monica</a>),
a high school senior with a painful past. Because the Key plays music
when you key in coordinates for teleportation, Kevin, an aspiring
musician, believes it to be some kind of synthesizer and monkeys with
the buttons. This allows Skeletor to detect its activity using his own
Key, and in a shot-for-shot, line-for-line copy of the scene in <i>The Empire Strikes Back</i> where
Darth Vader dispatches bounty hunters to track down Han Solo, Skeletor dispatches bounty hunters to track down He-Man.
Fortunately for our zeroes, Gwildor has another doohickey that lets him
track the Key as well, and so it's a race to get to Kevin, who has no
idea that both an S&M bear and a coterie of <i>Star Wars</i> alien rejects are converging on his location. Along the way, Kevin picks up <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0866055/">Mr. Strickland</a>. Hilarity ensues.<br />
<br />
<i>Masters of the Universe</i> sucks donkey balls. I've already mentioned that the movie follows the shitty comics nobody read rather than the hit TV show (whose day was already over by the time this turd flopped into theaters in 1987). I've already mentioned the shameless steals from <i>Star Wars</i>--the wardrobe (faux-Stormtroopers, Skeletor's look and use of Force Lightning), the plot points (bounty hunters, Skeletor falling down a never-ending shaft that's inexplicably in his throne room), the action sequences (hero uses sword to reflect laser fire back at his attackers). The acting is generally pretty bad. Among the heroes, and I shit you not, only Mr. Strickland provides anything like a fun performance. It's his standard schtick, but he does it well, and his character is the only likeable or believable one in the bunch, both in his initial skepticism of aliens and monsters and a magical teleporting synthesizer and in his subsequent dedication to getting the slackers to eat lead once undeniable proof is presented to him. As for the rest, Ivan is a charisma-free void, once again reminding the haters why <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082198/?ref_=nv_sr_2">Arnold Schwarzenegger was a genuine movie star</a>. Ivan's He-Man is so flat and bland he fades into the background, something that should never happen to a character named <i>He-Man</i>, for Christ's sake. As the ass-kicking female counterpart to He-Man, all I can say is Chelsea Field is no Sandahl Bergman. I know the script doesn't give Noodles any funny lines, but his stupid "comic" voice doesn't help matters. When it comes to short actors, not only is he a <i>looong</i> way from Peter Dinklage or even Warwick Davis, he's down in the pig trough with Danny fucking DeVito. TV's Monica and Tom Paris and their soap opera crap belong in another movie entirely, and by God I wish they'd go back to it.<br />
<br />
The only place this movie even begins to measure up to <i>Conan the Barbarian</i>--again, the '80s classic this movie <i>should've</i> ripped off--is in the villains. I've talked enough about the two <a href="http://mistermunshun.blogspot.com/2015/02/five-good-things-about-masters-of_15.html">lead</a> <a href="http://mistermunshun.blogspot.com/2015/04/five-good-things-about-masters-of.html">villains</a>. As for the bounty hunters, Beast Man is unrecognizable, more a cross between Chewbacca and the Wolf Man than anything inspired by the cartoon. Blade has a pretty good sword fight with He-Man, somewhat suckified by being ineptly shot and edited. Saurod, the lizard guy, is pretty creepy-looking (and so of course he's the one Skeletor elects to kill as punishment for the bounty hunters' initial failure). But, because this movie sucks, the villain that probably gets the most screen time and is the primary antagonist for much of the film is Karg, the most annoying and doofiest one of all.<br />
<br />
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<br />
Look at him. <i>Fucking look at him</i>. He's Gunner Nelson after 3 hours in a tanning bed. And he's got a hook-hand. That's a hook. Where his hand should be. In a world that has laser guns and teleportation across the goddamn universe. What is this guy, a fucking pirate of the high seas? All he does the whole movie is shout ineffectual commands at minions who are already doing what he's shouting at them to do in his gravelly voice that sounds like your great-aunt who smokes two packs of Marlboros a day. And no wonder nobody listens to him. He's like 3 feet tall, shouts incoherently while pointing off in the distance, and orders you to do shit you're already doing. Who made an Initech middle manager the head of a mercenary team? Boba Fett this guy ain't.<br />
<br />
<i>Masters of the Universe</i> blew so hard it sent Cannon Films on the road to death. Good riddance, says I. There may be no film studio in history that produced so many shit movies as against not even a single good one while blithely continuing to soldier on. It must be pretty impressive, in a pathetic kind of way, to labor at making movies for 15 years without making even <i>one</i> that was worth a damn. <i>Masters of the Universe</i> may not be <i>Ninja III: The Domination</i> bad, but Christ, it's a slog.<br />
<br />
Enough of that, I need a new target for my wrath against crap I liked when I was young and dumb. Hmm...you know, I <i>did</i> like <i>Ninja III</i>.... Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-16644763785631174322015-04-17T07:19:00.001-07:002017-08-10T20:34:26.862-07:00Revisit: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves<i>Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves</i> is the story of how Alan Rickman can single-handedly redeem a shitty motion picture through sheer force of personality and comic timing.<br />
<br />
When Kevin Costner came in at #2 on my <a href="http://mistermunshun.blogspot.com/2012/08/everybody-loves-lists.html">list of worst actors in the history of ever</a>, I had this to say about him: "Will be remembered long after his death for delivering the worst Robin
Hood of all time. Russell Crowe weeps nightly that his awful Robin Hood
will be forgotten while Costner's lives on." I said this because it is <i>absolutely true</i>. The Robin Hood Costner gives us in <i>Prince of Thieves</i> is the unquestionable <i>worst Robin Hood ever</i>. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_%281973_film%29">anthropomorphic fox Robin Hood</a> was more believable. You gave a better performance as Robin Hood when you were 8 years old running around your backyard with an imaginary bow and arrow. Yes, you, even if you're a woman. That's how bad Costner's performance is. It's not just the worst Robin Hood performance in the history of film. It's one of the worst performances period, of any role, at any time, in any medium. It's lazy non-acting that would give William Hurt pause. Orlando Bloom would tell him to step up and <i>act</i> for fuck's sake.<br />
<br />
Have you ever tried to put on an English accent? No matter how bad? So bad people didn't even know what accent you were going for? Congratulations, you put in more effort than Kevin Costner in <i>Prince of Thieves</i>. I mean, he doesn't even <i>try</i>. It's so obvious it provided the <a href="http://www.hark.com/clips/kxrtccjzrp-i-can-speak-with-an-english-accent">only funny gag</a> in <i>Robin Hood: Men in Tights</i>. Costner refuses to adopt an accent, refuses to emote, refuses to fucking <i>act</i>. He doesn't even puff up to the level of an epic fairy tale. Instead, he's the mumblecore Adam, wheezing out his lines like he's trying to clear his lungs of ennui. I can think of no one <i>less </i>appropriate to play possibly the most free-spirited, swashbuckling hero in the Western canon.<br />
<br />
The only miscasting that comes within a country mile of Costner's is that of professional Jack Nicholson impersonator Christian Slater. What's the deal with this asshole, anyway? I mean, he fails to embarrass himself in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathers">one good movie</a>, and <i>that's</i> a career? Slater has exactly one acting technique: He copies Jack Nicholson's distinctive vocal cadence. That's it. That was enough, in Hollywood in the 1990s, to make you a star.<br />
<br />
Let's pretend, for a moment, that what the world needed was an actor whose whole schtick is imitating another, better actor. That doesn't explain what the hell he's doing in a Robin Hood movie. I like Jack Nicholson. Hell, I love Jack Nicholson. You could even say I want to have Jack Nicholson's babies. Violent, womanizing babies perpetually high on very fine-grade cocaine. But Jack Nicholson is not a background presence, nor is he appropriate for period pieces. You don't cast him as Richard III or the First Emperor, because he's too modern. A '60s hippie? Right on! A hardboiled '70s private eye? Okay. A murderous hotel caretaker in the '80s? Bam! A hardass Marine colonel in the '90s? Sure. A pathetic sadsack in the '00s? Yep, you can put him there, too. Where you <i>can't</i> put him is in fucking Robin Hood, with Little John and Friar Tuck and Maid fucking Marian. So of course the jokers behind this clunker cast not Jack Nicholson, but a <i>terrible impersonator of Jack Nicholson</i>. What's next, raiding <i>MADtv </i>roll call to cast your movie? <a href="http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/disaster_movie/?search=disas">Oh wait.... </a><br />
<br />
Slater plays Will Scarlet, Robin Hood's long-lost bastard younger brother. Because that's just what the Robin Hood legend needed, right? I guess it's fitting, though, to cast an anachronistic actor like Slater (who simply <i>screams</i> "I'm from the '90s", even more than Neo in <i>Dangerous Liaisons</i> and <i>Bram Stoker's Fucking Not Dracula</i>) in an anachronistic role like Will Scarlet, who's all butthurt about Robin not accepting him as a brother and hates him for it for most of the movie. As if the bastard son of a noble in 12th-century England would harbor <i>that</i> as his Secret Pain. And against <i>Robin</i>, even though it was their father that refused to acknowledge him. He's lucky Robin doesn't have him executed for claiming to be Lord Locksley's son, which is what would've happened in that period if some random asshole suddenly told a lord's legitimate son that he was his illegitimate brother. Instead, Will is resentful and generally dickish to Robin before tearfully revealing The Secret, after which they hug while sappy music plays. It's medieval times, by way of early '90s angst!<br />
<br />
I guess I have to say something about the two good performances--well, one good and one <i>brilliant</i>. Morgan Freeman is good in the film as Azeem, the Moor who owes Robin a life debt for breaking him out of prison (though this one can be repaid by saving Robin's life, which Azeem thankfully does so Freeman wouldn't have to come back for a sequel). He's not great, though, and I have a theory (that I absolutely cannot prove) that Freeman did this on purpose. Once he realized that Costner was either unwilling or unable (or, as I suspect, <i>both</i>) to actually act, he decided (correctly) that giving a moving, powerful performance would both 1) show up the movie's star and 2) fail to jive with everyone else on screen. Now Freeman, at least before he was forced at gunpoint to appear in <a href="http://mistermunshun.blogspot.com/2013/08/red-dawnolympus-has-fallen.html"><i>Olympus Has Fallen</i></a> and thereafter stopped caring about movies, was incapable of giving a <i>bad</i> performance, but he made sure not to be <i>too</i> good here so as not to emphasize how godawful Costner is.<br />
<br />
The same cannot be said for Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham. Director Kevin Reynolds (who would fail to learn from his mistake and go on to direct Costner's lifeless corpse in <i>Waterworld</i>) must have mistaken Costner's lethargy that threatens to tank the entire movie for an artistic decision to make the Robin Hood legend "more realistic" (meaning grim, gritty, and no damn fun at all), so the Robin/Merry Men/Sherwood Forest scenes are all dour, drab, and dingy. Rickman, on the other hand, apparently decided to sod this movie and instead star in his own, better movie. All of his scenes are lively, funny, and endless entertaining. He's both devious and hilarious, slimy yet somehow charming at the same time. Rickman is hardly ever onscreen with Costner (so much so that I wonder if his contract specified a limit to his interaction with the sack of shit in the title role), so he didn't have to worry about showing Costner up or matching the flat nonperformances of everyone else. Or maybe he just didn't care. Either way, the film lights up into being almost decent every time Rickman appears, then sinks back into malaise as we get back to the "action" of Costner not emoting while Freeman struggles to be as bland as it's possible for him to be in order to match. When the Sheriff kidnaps Marian to force her to marry him, it beggars belief that she <i>wants </i>to be rescued by Robin. One of these two men is an international sex symbol, no matter how bad a haircut the filmmakers gave him for this movie, and the other is Kevin Costner. Marian only ends up with Robin because the Scriptmonster demands it.<br />
<br />
Every movie could use more Alan Rickman in it, this one more than any other. Dumb as I was when this movie came out, even then the Sheriff was my favorite character and I missed him whenever he wasn't onscreen. Way to understand movies less than a grade school kid does, Hollywood filmmakers. Yes, the kid we're talking about here is <i>me</i>, but it doesn't take my then-undeveloped godlike intellect to tell that Kevin Costner is worse than dick cancer and you should never under any circumstances allow him to be in your movie. We're talking about a man who built a movie around himself as a cowboy and still got blown off the screen by <i>Val fucking Kilmer</i>. That's right, Costner couldn't do a better cowboy that <i>Iceman</i>. It's safe to say that this is when you pack up your balls and leave acting behind.<br />
<br />
Mr. Costner, I know you're a cretinous humanoid automaton who used his clout to suppress a decent cowboy movie in favor your own personal shitty one, but as a self-appointed guardian of good taste, I have to impart to you one singular truth: Your movie is bad, and you should feel bad.Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-88133199329616607362015-04-15T14:04:00.000-07:002015-04-15T14:04:15.081-07:00Down Memory LaneYour old pal Carl Eusebius wasn't always a bitter, cantankerous old man. No, I was once a bitter, cantankerous child. Though my taste was never so bad that I liked a Michael Bay movie, it was still pretty goddamned bad. There were plenty of shitty movies during the '90s that I liked because I was young, stupid, and ignorant.<br />
<br />
I mean to revenge my(younger)self upon these movies. This new series will rip the shit out of crappy movies that I, for reasons lost to the sands of time, actually liked as a dumb teenager.<br />
<br />
So join your old pal on this jaunt down memory lane, as I show just how stupid I used to be before my Transfiguration into the semi-divine being I am today.Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-51914917745098792015-02-22T11:48:00.000-08:002015-12-28T17:06:36.051-08:00Five Good Things about Masters of the Universe: Number 1, SkeletorEvery <i>Masters of the Universe</i> review, contemporary and retro, will include 2 points. One, it's a piece of shit. Two, Skeletor is <i>fabulous</i>.<br />
<br />
After hiring <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolph_Lundgren">Ivan Drago</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Duncan_McNeill">Tom Paris</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courteney_Cox">TV's Monica</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Barty">Noodles MacIntosh</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Cypher">Major Dad's boss</a>, schlock kingpins Golan and Globus decided they'd better hire an actual actor for at least one role. And, like another <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVzAMmpMra8">genuine actor surrounded by stiffs</a> so wooden they had to fend off beavers throughout the shoot, Frank Langella understood exactly what kind of performance this movie needed and gave it a great one. I don't have much use for children, but thank God both Langella and Raul Julia had rugrats who convinced them to star in a shitty children's movie, because each actor's pitch-perfect camp is desperately needed to keep the audience from slipping into a coma.<br />
<br />
Langella, slathered in what has to be the most immobile face make-up in the history of movies (that as a bonus makes him look <i>nothing at all</i> like an animated skeleton), still manages to give a performance that overshadows the entire movie. How the hell he can emote at all using only his eyes, voice, and barely imperceptible chin movements I can't pretend to know, but he creates a genuine comic book villain that no amount of low-rent stormtroopers or bad synthesizer music can contain. When Man-at-Arms responds to Skeletor's threat to kill the Sorceress by defiantly shouting "You <i>dare</i> threaten her life?" and Skeletor thunders back, "I <i>dare anything</i>. I am <i>Skeletor!</i>", you see that Langella, if only at that moment, really believes he's an evil animated skeleton wizard. And for that same moment, so do you.<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HywW51wRhHo/VSwND8BrjPI/AAAAAAAAAKo/PfnuTKfChZM/s1600/url.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="177" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HywW51wRhHo/VSwND8BrjPI/AAAAAAAAAKo/PfnuTKfChZM/s1600/url.png" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Great villains, if there's nothing to balance them, warp the movie around them. So if you're going to have Hannibal Lector in your movie, you'd better have Clarice Starling, too. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannibal_Rising_%28film%29">If you don't</a>, then Lector takes over the movie and you realize you'd rather have the psycho villain win and kill everybody. As wonderfully entertaining as Langella is in the role, it's also irritating, because these clods don't <i>deserve</i> to oppose Skeletor. When Skeletor brings He-Man back to Eternia in chains, leaving He-Man's idiot friends behind on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth">a primitive and tasteless planet</a>, <i>that's how the movie should end</i>. Skeletor ought to win, if only because he's the only one having any fun at all. Kind of like Alan Rickman in <i>Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves</i>.<br />
<br />
Actually, <i>exactly</i> like that.<br />
<br />
The best scenes in the movie, it's no surprise, are between Skeletor and Evil-Lyn. I could write about them, but thankfully I don't have to. Instead, I'll just end this review with El Santo of <a href="http://1000misspenthours.com/">1000 Misspent Hours and Counting</a> doing it for me. <br />
<br />
"Frank Langella looks like he's having the time of his life as Skeletor,
unleashing all the Big, Hammy Evil...[Meg Foster] and Langella are so good at playing off of each other.
Watching them, you get a much stronger sense of their characters'
history together than anything in the script itself even faintly
suggests, an impression of two people (for lack of a better term) who
have known each other for years and have whatever passes among the
diabolically evil and thoroughly untrustworthy for a strong and stable
on-the-job friendship. Indeed, Langella and Foster get the best moment
in the whole film, right after Skeletor interrupts an unexpectedly
gentle interlude with Evil-Lyn in order to vaporize Saurod in the usual
arch-villain 'making an example of failure' bit. Evil-Lyn, standing
beside Skeletor’s throne, offers her opinion on how best to deal with
the others, at which point Skeletor grabs her, drags her down to stand
with the surviving bounty hunters, and informs her that she’ll be in
command of operations on Earth from now on. 'I was not suggesting that <i>I</i>
go,' she says, to which Skeletor retorts, 'Then you should not have
spoken.' It doesn’t sound like much, but it's all in the delivery:
Skeletor's sternly affectionate confidence in Evil-Lyn and her ability
to accomplish what Karg could not, Evil-Lyn’s complete lack of
confidence in the very same thing, the enormous danger inherent in
having someone like Skeletor believe that you're good at your job." <br />
<br />
So there you have it, Five Good Things about <i>Masters of the Universe</i>. There are any number of smaller things, too, like the fact that it provided James Tolkan a paycheck. (I hope you're sitting down, but he plays the role of a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_the_Future">gruff</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gun">belligerent</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WarGames">authority figure</a> who bullies the young protagonist.) But these are the top 5, which are almost enough to redeem the whole misbegotten enterprise.<br />
<br />
Movie still sucks ass, though.Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-21483088115793086982015-02-15T11:01:00.000-08:002015-04-14T06:29:36.652-07:00Five Good Things about Masters of the Universe: Number 2, Evil-Lyn<br />
Everything
about Evil-Lyn is right: the costume, the hairstyle, the performance,
the voice, the smoldering sexual tension with Frank Langella, <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/08/Evil-lynfoster.jpg">those <i>eyes</i></a>. Evil-Lyn is the only character the filmmakers got <i>exactly</i>
right. He-Man's a stiff, Man-at-Arms and Teela are unrecognizeable, the
Sorceress is old and English and doesn't turn into a bird or even wear a
bird on her head, Skeletor's make-up is terrible, Beast Man is a mute
lion furry, Karg and Blade and that...lizard...guy aren't even from the
series, Battle Cat doesn't even get to be in the movie--but they got
Evil-Lyn right.<br />
<br />
I don't know who decided to cast Meg
Foster in the role, but that person deserved a raise. And to think the
filmmakers seriously considered <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmMhzaF7puM">making her wear contact lenses to hide her eyes</a>.
All the other things I mentioned help, but it's really her eyes that
set Evil-Lyn apart. She doesn't seem to belong in the movie, which is
why the character works. She's truly otherworldly, in a way that the
lion furry, the lizard man, the goofy muppets, and the guy with an
immobile mask for a face aren't. She's mysterious and sultry, and
totally believable as Skeletor's dark companion. I mean, she's got evil
right there in her name!<br />
<br />
Her best scene is every scene
she's in, but my personal favorite is when Skeletor gains the Power
Cosmic and totally doesn't share it with her: She leaves. That's right,
she's all, "Smell ya later" and jets. No scream of rage, no continuing
to fight He-Man even though she has no quarrel with him at this point,
no foolish attempt to charge at possibly the most powerful being in the
universe at that point--she just blows the joint. Now of course, there
was no sequel to this movie, because it blew harder than an episode of<i> The O'Reilly Factor</i>.
But it was a great sequel set-up, with Evil-Lyn abandoning Skeletor to
his fate, still out there, waiting for the time to strike, in a way far
more subtle and devious than ol' Bonehead ever managed.<br />
<br />
And then they fuck it up with a post-credit sequence showing Skeletor not dead. Hel-<i>lo</i>!
You already set up the sequel, dipshits. Evil-Lyn. She left when the
heroes were incapacitated and Skellie was having a space orgasm,
remember? Oh that's right, you don't remember, <i>BECAUSE THIS MOVIE IS FUCKING STUPID!</i> <br />
<br />
I can't believe there's no scene of Evil-Lyn trying to seduce He-Man. Probably because nobody would buy him turning her down.Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-10089255610329421872015-02-13T12:40:00.000-08:002015-04-14T06:30:00.550-07:00Five Good Things about Masters of the Universe: Number 3, Eternia<br />
Apart from
the faux-Stormtrooper armor of Skeletor's guards, the look of the movie's planet Eternia is pretty rad. For not much money (and with no CGI), they create a rather interesting
alien planet and pull off some snazzy shots. French artist Moebius, who lent his
considerable artistic talent either directly or indirectly to the visual designs of <i>Blade Runner</i>, <i>Alien</i>, and <i>Dune</i>, did some
impressive conceptual work. The film opens on a nice matte painting of the exterior of the iconic Castle Grayskull, and most of the first act takes place within, on what is really a neat set. Think the Emperor's throne room in <i>Return of the Jedi</i>, complete with a dangerous and highly unnecessary bottomless shaft for the black-robed, white-faced lightning-shooting evil wizard to fall into, combined with the Emperor's throne room in <i>Dune</i>.<br />
<br />
He-Man gets a great introduction. Skeletor, having taken Grayskull, believes he has won. (And, were it not for the contrivances provided by the screenwriters' trusty Plot-O-Matic 3000, he has.) This being the case, he occasionally makes bombastic announcements to the "people of Eternia" as their new ruler, in which his giant face is holographically projected (presumably) all around the planet. Against the background of Skeletor's colossal face declaring that "Those who do not pledge themselves to me shall be destroyed!", He-Man appears in the foreground, tiny and alone on a rocky outcropping, his ripply muscle-y Dolph Lundgren back to us, staring grimly (I assume) at this evidence of Skeletor's seeming victory. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG1AWVLnl48&list=PL5919C8DE6F720A2D&index=2">This shot says everything we need to know just by the visuals. Rebels, Empire. We get a sense of how small and ill-equipped the Rebels are and how large and powerful <strike>the Empire</strike> Skeletor is</a>.<br />
<br />
They then immediately ruin this nice moment by showing He-Man fighting men in reflective padded armor shooting laser guns while he uses his sword to deflect their blaster fire back at them. Hmm...where have I seen <i>that</i> before?<br />
<br />
But hey, if you're gonna steal, steal from the best, amirite?<br />
<br />
<br />
Of course, because this movie sucks, we almost
immediately leave Eternia and spend the rest of the movie on boring old
Earth, that <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093507/quotes?item=qt0211578">primitive and tasteless planet</a>. But for a few early scenes, man, they were really onto something.Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-73391657846912897212015-02-11T07:35:00.000-08:002015-04-14T06:30:48.113-07:00Five Good Things about Masters of the Universe: Number 4, He-Man gets captured.<br />
It's so cliche even <i>Austin Powers</i>
made fun of it. Roger Ebert gave it a name: The Fallacy of the Talking
Killer. Not only does it appear on the Evil Overlord list, but it
appears <i>several times</i>.<br />
<br />
The villain has the hero
dead to rights. All he has to do is pull the trigger. "Bang. Dead." to
quote Scott Evil. But he doesn't. He has to kill the hero in some
elaborate way. Or he has to kill him after he has destroyed all that he
holds dear. Or he has to explain his plan first. Or he has to kill him
after he attains ultimate power in the universe.<br />
<br />
Which
is to say, he has to let the hero put his escape plan into action so we
can have a crowd-pleasing end-of-the-movie fight scene.<br />
<br />
The
wrong way to do this is how it's down in every James Bond movie ever: a
naked plot contrivance. The villain can't kill the hero because then
the hero would be dead and the movie would be over. The right way is to
give the villain a <i>reason</i> to keep the hero alive.<br />
<br />
Now
if you're a hack fraud, you'll say, "But Carl Eusebius, you just gave
reasons! The villain can't kill the hero because of his hubris. He has
to triumph in such a way that blah blah" shut the fuck up. "The villain
is arrogant" is not a reason, it's a plot contrivance. A <i>reason</i> comes from a <i>character</i>.
It's called "motivation". Every character in your story has to have it,
else your story isn't about human beings or anything like them. If a
villain is so arrogant that he'll risk his own life due to his
arrogance, you have to <i>set that up</i>. It has to emerge from the villain's <i>character</i>.
Let me give you two examples from movies that don't suck. One movie is
great, and the other is good in a schlocky action kind of way, just to
show you that "action" doesn't mean "dumb".<br />
<br />
In <i>Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan</i>,
the titular villain doesn't personally have Kirk in his sights, but he
has a man who does, Captain Terrell. Terrell informs Khan that he has
Kirk at phaserpoint and also has possession of the Genesis device, so
that Khan is free to take the device at any time. Khan, being a villain
in an actual movie, immediately orders Terrell to execute Kirk, since,
as he puts it, "First thing's first." Terrell is too good a person to
gun someone down in cold blood, even under mind control, so he fails to
do so. Kirk then taunts Khan, demanding that he face him personally.
Khan, being a villain in an actual movie (did I mention that part?),
correctly suspects that he has nothing to gain by doing this. At this
moment he is in control; going to Kirk's location means fighting on
Kirk's terms, not his own. Instead, he can destroy <i>Enterprise</i> and
leave Kirk permanently stranded. This victory would be poetic (and we
know Khan is a cultured man who would appreciate the poetry of his
vengeance, since he quotes Milton and Melville at the drop of a hat),
because Kirk has earlier abandoned Khan and his wife. What better way to
revenge himself upon Kirk than to consign him to the same fate?<br />
<br />
At the end of the film, Kirk is back on <i>Enterprise</i>, which in its current state is much weaker than Khan's <i>Reliant</i>. To make up for this, <i>Enterprise </i>flees
into a nebula, where both ships will be crippled to the same degree.
Khan rather wisely again refuses to fight on Kirk's terms. But
Kirk knows Khan, the kind of man he is. Because <i>The Wrath of Khan</i> is a great film, it now inverts the earlier situation that led to <i>Enterprise</i> being crippled in the first place. In that situation, Khan approached <i>Enterprise</i> as a friend, since <i>Reliant</i> is a fellow Starfleet ship, while refusing to make contact<i></i>
to avoid giving the game away. One of Kirk's officers quoted a
regulation requiring defensive action against any ship, even a Starfleet
ship, that has not been successfully contacted. Because Khan knows Kirk
well, he correctly guesses that Kirk will ignore this regulation and instead
rely on his own judgment. This allows Khan to cripple Kirk's ship by
firing without warning on a defenseless <i>Enterprise</i>.<br />
<br />
But
now, at the end, it's Kirk's knowledge of Khan that will in turn lead
to Khan's crushing defeat. Kirk gets on the line and taunts Khan, this
time not angrily, but mockingly. "I'm laughing at the 'superior
intellect'", he says with barely concealed mirth, purposefully using
Khan's own language to goad him. Khan then makes the fatal decision to
enter the nebula, where he finds only defeat and death.<br />
<br />
The second film I've already talked about, but fuck it, here it is again. In <i>Commando</i>,
the villain Bennett has Matrix at gunpoint, as he holds the latter's
daughter hostage. Matrix plays on his knowledge of Bennett's psych (they
were in special forces together for many years) to get Bennett to
discard both the gun and the girl and fight Matrix as an equal. In a
shitty action movie, this would work because villains are dumb. But here
it works because <i>Commando</i> carefully lays the groundwork for it
to work. Bennett is shown to take pleasure in killing with knives rather
than guns, so he can see his victims' eyes as the life oozes out of
them. Bennett is repeatedly shown comparing himself to Matrix, claiming
they are equals and superior to the common soldiers around them. Even if
no one else were around to see it, if Bennett defeated Matrix only
because he had his daughter as hostage and the gun, he would always have
that doubt: Was I really better than him? Because Bennett has been
measuring himself against Matrix for a long time, only by beating him
"fairly" can he be sure, in his own mind, that he's really the best.
Even then, Bennett's no fool. Once he realizes Matrix is winning and he
manages to locate the discarded gun, he doesn't hesitate to use it. Wanting to be
the best is one thing, but he's not dying for it.<br />
<br />
So it is for <i>Masters of the Universe</i>.
As the film opens, Skeletor has won. He's captured Castle Grayskull and
the Sorceress. All he needs to do is to drain her power and wait for the
stars to align and he gains ultimate power in the universe or whatever. The
forces of good have been reduced to a ragtag resistance force, with
He-Man as its charismatic leader. When Skeletor sends his forces out to
capture He-Man, his right-hand woman Evil-Lyn inquires why he doesn't
order them to kill him. Skeletor replies, "If I kill him, I make him a
martyr, a saint." Instead, he plans to capture He-Man, utterly break
him, and parade this shattered and dejected enemy leader in front of the
world, to demoralize all his followers and discourage anyone else from
being one. See, <i>that's</i> a reason not to kill the hero, at least not right away.Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-20913977178342434142015-02-09T07:42:00.001-08:002015-04-14T06:30:37.168-07:00Five Good Things about Masters of the Universe, Number 5, No Prince Adam.<br />
Maybe they realized how moronic
it would look to have the same live-action actor playing both Adam and
He-Man, or maybe they didn't want to pay for the special effects required to portray the transformation
sequence, or maybe Dolph Lundgren refused to wear pink and white tights.
For whatever reason, there's no Adam. He-Man is just He-Man.<br />
<br />
This deprives us, of course, of the homoerotic transformation sequence: Surrounded in light and projected against the imposing background of the ominous Castle Grayskull (that way they can use the same sequence no matter where Adam is at the time), mild-mannered <strike>Clark Kent</strike> Prince Adam holds his sword aloft in the most phallic way possible as his clothes disappear and he turns into a ripply muscle-y barbarian with a killer tan. He then bench-presses his sword while shouting, "I have The Powerrrrrr!" to no one in particular. This seems to be a necessary step in order to turn his mild-mannered tiger companion into the monstrous Battle Cat, a tiger that <i>isn't</i> mild-mannered. Which, you know, is better for fighting evil. He-Man does this by pointing his iron-hard rod--the Sword, I mean--at him, shooting a white-hot stream of <i>lightning</i> that transforms him into BC. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homoeroticism">I don't know why He-Man has to bench press the sword first</a>, but there you go. Actually, he does it even when BC isn't around to be transformed, so I officially have no idea why he does this.<br />
<br />
As for the movie, at its climax, He-Man finally, <i>finally</i> holds aloft The Sword and shouts "I have The Powerrrrrr!" as he's enveloped in light, and...it doesn't make any sense. He never did that before and never does it again. It just comes out of nowhere, because it was in the show...even though the movie doesn't <i>follow</i> the show, since he doesn't transform. He just shouts and glows in light while Skeletor stands there thinking, "The fuck is he on about?" It goes back to how Cannon tried to have it both ways. The "I have The Power" line is so iconic they felt they had to include it, even though it doesn't make any sense in the context of their adaptation. (Think the last-minute nonsensical never-referenced-again "By your command" line in the <i>Battlestar Galactica</i> remake.) <br />
<br />
Still, there's no Prince Adam. And we're
all happy about that. Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2920518586829685863.post-26034743484898921062015-02-05T05:59:00.002-08:002015-04-14T06:30:25.719-07:00Five Good Things About Masters of the Universe<i>Masters of the Universe</i> is one of the worst theatrically-released action movies of the 1980s. It's so bad it sunk its production company, the unparalleled masters of crap known as Cannon Films, a company that even <i>The Apple </i>and 17 Chuck-Norris-in-Vietnam movies couldn't destroy. But <i>MotU </i>managed it.<br />
<br />
Masters of the Universe began as a toy line, whose only "story" consisted of mini-comics included with each <strike>doll</strike> <i>action figure</i>. Not a lot of depth there. This is a toy line in which the muscle-y barbarian hero is named "He-Man" and the villain, who is an animated skeleton, is called "Skeletor". A skeleton. Named Skeletor. They must've spent upwards of <i>minutes</i> coming up with that one. The Filmation cartoon series added more depth, but it was actually <i>worse</i> because the added elements made even less sense. The dumbest thing of all was giving He-Man an alter ego in the form of the meek and ineffective Prince Adam. In order to "transform" into He-Man, Adam had to pull the Sword of Power from his back and hold it aloft in the most phallic way possible, standing as <i>erect </i>as his <i>iron-hard sword</i> allows in order to become a <i>real man</i>. (It's not quite on the order of <i>Thundercats</i>, in which the hero's sword <i>literally grows longer and stronger </i>as he cries out for a lady of the evening, but it's not far off.) Never mind the fact that Adam is wearing pink and white tights, so there's no way he could carry a sword strapped to his back without its being visible, yet it doesn't appear until he reaches for it, and never mind that Adam looks <i>exactly</i> like He-Man, only paler and wearing clothes. Superman at least wore glasses. He-Man...loses his tan. Surely Skeletor will never penetrate this cunning disguise! And even when yer old pal Carl Eusebius was a wee tot 3 years of age and therefore dumb enough to like this crap, he wondered how Adam could be a weakling when he has exactly the same ripped physique as He-Man. <br />
<br />
I guess it's still better than Battle Cat, the tiger He-Man rides (really). BC transmogrifies from a green-and-yellow-striped tiger into a green-and-yellow-striped tiger...wearing a hat. It takes the Sword of Power to put a hat on a tiger? Was The Sword designed by Siegfried and Roy?<br />
<br />
So MotU sucked from the beginning, making it a real challenge for Cannon: Make the film too similar to the show, and it'll be terrible, but make it too different, and you lose the built-in audience of dumb kids that presumably were the reason the film was made in the first place. Being the kings of bad decisions, the people at Cannon decided to go for broke and do <i>both</i>. Following the comics and not the TV show, the movie left kids who only knew the show baffled (almost all of them, since the comics had long since been discontinued by 1987 and the show was the closest MotU had to canon at that point), while the adults who didn't know anything about the series guffawed at every mention of the name "He-Man" and sat bored out of the their <i>skull-bones</i> until the credits rolled.<br />
<br />
Still, before I rip into this piece of shit, I wanted to point out some good things about it. Because as bad as it is, there <i>are</i> some really, really effective parts. And that just makes yer old pal Carl Eusebius even madder. This good stuff, wasted here in this pile of crap. It's enough to make you want to stop purposefully watching shitty movies and writing a terrible blog about them. So, over the next five days, enjoy Five Good Things about <i>Masters of the Universe</i>.Carl Eusebiushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03506073715797771632noreply@blogger.com0